In 2011, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said something about piracy that has stuck with me:
“Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.”1
His point was fairly simple. If an unauthorised service is easier to use than the one selling the product, the seller has a problem.
At the time, that could mean waiting months for something to reach your country, dealing with region locks or restrictive DRM, or hunting down a physical copy while an unauthorised version was already online.
Installing a media server is the easy part.
It may not feel easy the first time. There are unfamiliar settings, folders that refuse to appear and devices that behave differently for no obvious reason. Eventually, though, the application starts. A film plays on the television. An album appears on a phone. The small thrill of having built something useful is real.
For a while, that can feel like the finished project.
Self-hosting is often presented as an answer to every problem. I do not think it is.
A service can be open source, privacy-friendly and technically interesting while still being the wrong thing for me to operate. Every service adds updates, storage, monitoring, backups, permissions and another failure mode. The aim is not to recreate every cloud product at home. The aim is to keep control where control is valuable without turning the homelab into a second job.
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