and its been this way my whole life.
I got into self hosting cause me and my friends wanted to play some games and i figured id google how to run the servers for them. We didnt know what the fuck we were doing. We just wanted to run game and chat servers so we could play the stuff we wanted, we started out Windows Server 2008 on random computers given to us by someone who knew someone who knew someone. and I enjoyed it so I kept doing it. Me and my friend ran free teamspeaks for a couple hundred people because we just felt like it, we ran a plex server, we torrented stuff, we ran minecraft and other random game servers. We ran git, some websites, some forums too. All on like a $30/month (at the time) dedicated server- kinda expensive, but my friend felt like paying for it, and others chipped in when they could. they wanted stuff run for them, we wanted to run stuff, it was a good fit!
like you cannot model this shit as rugged individualism. if we want to break away from central services we need to think about this in terms of communities. if you hate self hosting then you shouldnt be the one doing it! If the ball doesn't fit in your mouth it's not yours.
In the circles I run in, there's some people who know how to 3D print and do that for others. Some people who do baking. Some people who do sewing. Some people who do fermenting or w/e, some who do drawing, mushroom growing, soldering, poetry, whatever. people do the shit that they enjoy doing and they share it with others, and thats the only way this works, because nobody actually wants or can do literally everything.
but to do this we need to build communities. and devs need to build stuff designed for communities to run. Not everyone knows that one person who will host shit. I wonder if maybe it used to be easier to know that one person. before software became so centralized, people were doing self-hosting just out of necessity. they weren't a huge nerd about it they stumbled into it because they had to. but then some stayed cause they liked it. Some became huge nerds about it like me, others just stayed there kinda doing their thing. thats it!
