All it costs to fulfill the average person's needs for digital services is a $5 per month VPS instance. It's even cheaper if you buy a single board computer and host your services at home.
We've been letting companies steal our personal data and sell it to the highest bidder and destroying democracy in the process all to save what? A coffee a month?
This is one of the worst deals in history.
@jeff I run a FreedomBox instance on a single board computer which I temporarily moved to a 2.5 euro instance on Hetzner till I can fix the power backup issue at home. I wrote about my usage here
https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/UserExperience
We cannot expect the average privacy-conscious person to have sysadmin and infosec skills. The self-hosting platform should take care of these. In my case, I trust the underlying #Debian operating system to provide me regular security updates and #FreedomBox for maintenance.
@njoseph There are certain issues with security when you talk about cloud hosting though. We take these for granted when a large company like Google is hosting our data, but when we self-host it becomes our responsibility.
FYI I am reading up on FreedomBox now so forgive me if I have asked questions that I will inevitably discover the answers to in my research.
@njoseph the $ cost is not the major barrier. I have a friend who can do email and FB, but thinks a wiki with a WYSIWYG editor requires a "tech whiz" to operate (their words). Geeks tend to heavily under-appreciate how much experience-based knowledge we hold, and how complicated learning new digital tools and processes is for most people
@njoseph IMHO breaking folks out of the #DataFarms requires every geek to set up a VPS (or box-in-the-closet) for their tribe (150 closest family and friends), and actively trained anyone keen to learn how to do the same; #CommunityHosting more so than #SelfHosting
@akkartik @njoseph Amen to that. I'm trying to retrain myself to patiently explain to people why I avoid FB and suggest they do the same, instead of getting all exasperated and sarcastic as if it should be obvious to everyone by now. Again, it's easy to forget how much experience-based knowledge I hold as a fulltime geek activist
@njoseph What do you host on that small of an instance and is it just for you? How do you do security? And finally what about putting all your data in one place? Do you worry about the service provider downtime or equipment malfunction and losing all your data?