What's self-hosting & why is it important?

Self-hosting means running your very own instance of whatever application you wish to use, on a server.

Here's an infomercial to quickly get you up-to-speed:

A great but simple example is Nextcloud, it's an open-source software suite that's popular for file sharing & backups, but also has other functionality like text, calling, calendar & more by means of plugins.

You could start up your own instance of Nextcloud with our help, and move away from Google Drive/Photos or iCloud backup etc, once setup you download the iOS/Android app, configure it once & it syncs your files automatically.

That's one example, there are so many other amazing FOSS apps that support this self-hosting model.

The benefits of self-hosting are:

• Never pay for software subscriptions again, you still have to rent a server or you can buy your own, but it's cheaper, super flexible and you can host multiple apps on the one server! 🤩
• You're in full control, you can move your data at anytime and to any other service if need be, no vendor lock-ins, contracts or fine-prints, you unequivocally own your data 🛂
• No ads, tracking, data harvesting or any nasty stuff: since you aren't using a big tech app, all your data lives on your server and since all software is FOSS, it's ad-free by default 🙂‍↕️