Self-hosting is becoming more interesting for a reason that has little to do with fashionable infrastructure. People are discovering that services they relied on can become worse while they are still using them.
Features disappear. Prices change. Limits arrive. Advertising takes over. A product that began as useful becomes harder to use, less private or dependent on an account that can be closed.
Cory Doctorow calls this process enshittification. In Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, he argues that platforms can first attract users with convenience, then lock in users and businesses before shifting value away from both groups.1 The Creative Salon article supplied alongside this book is another useful reference point for the discussion.2
What this has to do with self-hosting
Self-hosting is not a cure for every problem. It does not remove the need for electricity, updates, backups, domains, broadband or sensible security. It also does not mean every cloud service should be replaced.
It does provide something valuable: an alternative place for important data and services to exist.
A local photo library means a company changing its storage rules does not become the only authority over the family archive. A self-hosted media server means access to an owned collection does not depend entirely on one catalogue or subscription. An encrypted backup means a hardware failure is not automatically a permanent loss. A service such as Karakeep can keep bookmarks and saved material in a system you can back up and inspect.
The goal is not technological purity. The goal is to avoid making one company the only place where an important service, memory or copy of a file exists.
The practical test
Before adopting a service, ask:
- Can the data be exported?
- Is the export usable somewhere else?
- Does it work without a mandatory cloud account?
- Are open formats or documented APIs available?
- Can the application data be backed up and restored?
- What happens if development stops?
- What happens if the company changes its pricing or licence?
- Can the service be replaced without losing the underlying data?
A nominal export is not necessarily an exit route. A collection of files that cannot be opened elsewhere is only a different kind of lock-in.
A balanced approach
Cloud services remain useful. They can provide availability, collaboration, off-site protection and less maintenance. The mistake is not using them. The mistake is allowing a provider to become the only copy, the only login and the only route to something important.
A reasonable arrangement is often mixed:
- Use a hosted service where it is genuinely convenient.
- Keep local copies of important data where practical.
- Prefer open or widely supported formats.
- Maintain an independent backup.
- Test restoring something before it is urgent.
- Know what you would use if the provider disappeared.
This is why the principle here is simple: keep it simple, keep it local, keep a copy.
Self-hosting is not about building a private version of every website. It is about keeping enough control that a platform becoming worse does not automatically make your own data, memories or workflow worse with it.