> I don’t think most people realize how much they’ve given up.

I think many are overstating how much people are giving up. People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place. That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular.

> Unfortunately it’s a fair bit of work to reclaim everything as your story shows.

This work would be necessary anyway, that's the whole reason why people prefer letting other people doing this work.

> I switched to my own modem and router recently for privacy from my ISP

I'm curious, which privacy can you regain from an ISP, who is already seeing all your internet-traffic? And are we talking here about separate modem & router?

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garciasn 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place. That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular.

I can--and did for the better part of ~15 years--run and maintain my own self-hosted everything (hardware, DNS, SMTP, httpd, etc, etc, etc). Then I got married and had kids and went to grad school and had a demanding job where I was doing many of the same things I did at home.

I just fucking don't have the personal time nor desire to manage that shit any longer. Why? Because I have better things to do w/my free time than fuck around with my homelab (or whatever the in-term is these days). When I'm done with work, I just want to go outside or read a book.

I am VERY WELL AWARE of the risks and privacy implications; but, my actual freedom from the day-to-day is worth far more to me at this point in my life.

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ryandrake 5 days ago | parent [-]

I do the same things (self-hosted server, NAS storage, DNS, email, http for a handful of domains, some development VMs) and it's really set-and-forget. It doesn't require maintenance. Every once in a while LetsEncrypt's certbot falls over and I have to log in to manually refresh ssh certificates, but HN commenters tell me it's user error, so it's something I can also fix to be set-and-forget if I really cared.

My self-hosting infrastructure will probably outlive me.

	▲	bevr1337 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The person you're replying to said they maintained a homelab for 15 years. I'm sure they have the experience to correctly gauge the amount of effort required. What you're arguing is qualitative. There is _some_ maintenance, as you admitted, and the OP has other priorities. I personally relate to the person you're replying to. I sleep better not worrying about HDD health or if my APs can reach their controller. Tried it - not for me.

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bambax 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place

Regarding need: strong disagree. I want to be able to re-read a book, to open it in any an ebook reader on my desktop to search / copy from it, etc. I want to re-watch good movies any time. I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any media I produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or politics.

I self host everything. I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and if it can't be, I return it immediately.

Regarding ability: Sure it's a bit of a pain, but it's not that hard if you're just a bit technical. Everything is done via GUI, there is never anything to type in a console. And if you're not technical yourself, you probably know someone who is.

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slightwinder 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Regarding need: strong disagree. I want to be able to re-read a book, to open it in any an ebook reader on my desktop to search / copy from it, etc. I want to re-watch good movies any time.

That's your demand, not everyone's demand. And it seems are also indirectly assuming here that this is impossible without self-hosting, which also is not necessarily true.

The problem, is, we don't know. Self-hosting is like backups, it's working for a situation which might or might not happen; it's annoying, and it can save your ass, but most of the time you will never know if it ever will save your ass, until it actually happens. And until that point, it's just annoying. So we usually don't know if we really want to re-read a specific book and whether it has been become unavailable for us. We simply don't know that, until it happens.

> I certainly don't want to lose my photos or any media I produce because of some corporate policy or quota, or politics.

True, but that's why you should have backups. You don't need to manage a whole infrastructure for all your stuff, when you can also just make regularly backups. Of course, to be fair, most people don't even make backups, or know how to manage them well. But I would say those people can't (or should?) self-host their infrastructure anyway, they would probably blow their own data up in one way or another and lose them anyway.

> I only buy what can be de-DRM'd and if it can't be, I return it immediately.

See, that's your stance, most people don't give an f** about this. They want things now, and don't care for some uncertain future.

> but it's not that hard if you're just a bit technical.

Which most people are not. But it's not about the technical ability, self-hosting is mainly a problem of time, money and habit. Yes, many people can get it done if they invest into it, but they don't, many can't. And that won't ever change.

	▲	_-_-__-_-_- 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I like having my media locally, non-drm and under my control as well. I've grown-up in an era when media flowed freely on the Internet (music, tv, movies, books, academic papers, games and software). It takes a minimum of effort, but it's also not sorcery. It's just a collection of files sitting on a hard drive. I then have layers of software (docker containers) to serve those files and keep databases with metadata listings up-to-date. I also enjoy cataloguing and maintaining my own media. It's a passion and a pastime. That's why I continue to save media.

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jdgoesmarching 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> most people

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jahewson 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most traffic nowadays is HTTPS so as long as you configure your router to use a non-ISP DNS resolver such 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (Google) then your ISP cannot see your traffic.

However, those ISP branded modem/router devices are completely backdoored and can be accessed by ISP employees for remote support. As they are your router they also get to see your internal network traffic. HTTPS traffic remains encrypted of course, but I personally would never let an ISP have access to my hardware.

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bix6 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If it was easier to do the work yourself I think more would out of privacy, price, and longevity concerns.

Separate modem and router. Using my own modem kicks out my ISP from individual MAC so they can’t see as much device level info. Plus they wouldn’t let me setup a guest network. And now I can monitor the devices myself which is mostly for fun. I run a device VPN when I don’t want them to see traffic but I’ll likely set it up network wide when I have time, which I couldn’t do on their system.

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fsflover 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> People exchange control for comfort, but most people never had any need or ability for this control in the first place

"People exchange free speech for comfort, but most people never need the former anyway, so it's okay".

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mihaaly 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> That's why cloud-services became popular, and remain popular.

Or, because they do not know and do not care what is happening. Yes, they only care about comfort, who reads TOS anyway, right?! : /

But if the same was happening to their physical not digital properties then they might be furious.