I self-host not because it is cheaper or easier, but because it lets me break things in very personal, handcrafted ways.
Also because the server lives in Europe and speaks politely to GDPR.
But jokes aside, I am genuinely curious:
Why do so many technically aware people still default to Google, Microsoft, or Meta for almost everything?
Is it convenience? Habit? The feeling that “everyone is there anyway”?
Or maybe the quiet assumption that opting out is pointless because the damage is already done?
The problem is not that these platforms are evil in a comic-book sense. The problem is structural. Their business models are fundamentally built around surveillance, profiling, and extraction of behavioral data. Even when you are not the customer, you are the product. Often both.
Your email metadata, your documents, your location history, your contacts, your photos, your calendar patterns. All of it is collected, correlated, retained, and analyzed. Not because someone is spying on you personally, but because at scale, this data becomes power. Economic, political, and informational power.
And the argument “I have nothing to hide” misses the point entirely. Privacy is not about hiding wrongdoing. It is about retaining agency. About not having your digital life continuously optimized for engagement, monetization, or influence by systems you neither control nor meaningfully understand.
What makes this especially frustrating is that alternatives exist. Good ones. Mature ones. European ones. Open-source ones. Federated ones. Boring ones, even. Email providers that do not scan your inbox. Search engines that do not follow you across the web. Social platforms that do not build shadow profiles of non-users. Cloud services where data residency is not a marketing slogan but a default.
Yes, they may require a bit more effort. Sometimes the UI is less polished. Sometimes you have to read documentation. Sometimes you even have to think.
But that trade-off buys you something valuable: autonomy.
Self-hosting is not for everyone, and it does not need to be. Neither is abandoning Big Tech overnight. But questioning defaults should be normal for people who claim to understand technology. Blind trust in massive, opaque platforms is not pragmatism. It is outsourcing responsibility.
So I will keep running my small, imperfect services. I will keep breaking them. Fixing them. Learning from them.
And I will keep asking this question, especially to fellow tech people:
If we know how these systems work, why do we still accept them as inevitable?
#SelfHosting #Privacy #DigitalAutonomy #Fediverse #OpenSource #Decentralization #BigTech #DataOwnership #SurveillanceCapitalism #GDPR #TechCulture
