Bad isn't a binary judgment you can place on something.

Everything has a level of risk and reward associated with it. It's up to everyone to judge the risk versus reward.

The flaw I see a lot in the HN comments trying to get people to abandon Big Tech is that they're coming from people who overestimate the risks while underestimating the benefits to other people.

Abandoning a lot of convenience for fear of some rare outcome might be a perfectly good choice for someone who doesn't use those conveniences (e.g. Linux user who doesn't want cloud storage for photos because they enjoy setting up their own elaborate backup schemes) but it's not a good tradeoff for the average person who just wants their photos backed up and either doesn't want to or doesn't trust themselves to set up a good backup solution.

My model for this is to have one nerd per group of people, who runs digital infra for the community. I'm that nerd for my friends, and run a bunch of self-hosted services that people I personally know use. Some of them even pitch in to help pay for the hosting costs (though not my time).