I've thought deeply about this topic but from the pro-suburbia side and I actually agree with the analogy. At a bare minimum if you want to be independent you need a domain which is ~$10/year. That's a small amount but it's already more than most people will pay. (IMO this is irrational if you're paying >$500/year for cellular service but I digress.) Good home servers like Helm (RIP) or Umbrel are $300+ upfront. A good NAS that can also self-host is even more. As you said, if your ISP sucks maybe you have to upgrade to "pro" broadband that's more expensive. Ultimately you're spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a worse replacement for services that are already "free".

Self-hosting is like spending money putting a swimming pool in your backyard when you could walk to a public pool instead.

You get this wrong. The expensive part isn't the tech at all. You can self-host a lot of things on a old laptop in a drawer while you access it via your routers wireguard VPN connection, without any domain renting.

The expensive part is aquiring the skills needed to pull that off.

I've always thought it would be great for the government to provide a free domain name for every citizen. There's really not much you can do without DNS.

Paying $10/yr for a domain is well worth the cost just to be free of attaching your entire digital life to a gmail etc account that can be easily taken from you with no recourse.

But beyond that self hosting is a hobby. It’s not nearly turnkey or cheap enough to justify unless you enjoy the process of self hosting itself.

There are other benefits outside the monetary equation of course like control of which the value is dependent on the self-hoster.

The one thing I desperately wish Umbrel shipped with was an easy way to network with other Umbrel users for backup and accessibility. Let people set limits in terms of how much storage they're willing to allocate to others. REQUIRE end-to-end encryption on backed up files. But help people create their own community micro-clouds using each other's computers.

To me, the risk of backing things up in one building is too high, but the inconvenience of going even somewhere else in my own town regularly enough to rotate my backups is too high. But if my family members and I could easily back up each other's systems from our various states? Or my group of dorky college friends who are now all over the world could easily share with each other? We'd be all over it.

I disagree. From experience (see my username), self-hosting is hardly expensive. A $50 ex-corporate SFF with a couple of large M.2 or SATA SSDs will be a lot more powerful and easier to set up and manage than a Raspberry Pi, while not drawing much power. The ongoing costs are larger than not self-hosting, but not terrible - unless you want a symmetric connection, the domain name renewal is the expensive part.

> for services that are already "free".

The problem is that people still believe that if they don't pay money, a service is free. But so many do not question why it is free. Hint: Not because Google just wants you to succeed and have a good life. And then, without any second thought, they literally upload their whole private digital life.

If you don't pay, usually, you're the product.

you went from 10USD to thousands in a few sentences.

self-hosting has a lot of degrees. if you want your own TLD and peer with Tier1s, then it's astronomical, woo! But using dynDNS is also an option.

Especially if you compare to non-self-hosted services. You get a subdomain and that's it. (Or nothing, maybe some handle on Instagram.)