But they don't seem to advertise and very few people know it's a really good option (with phone apps to replace the cloud ones, even).
It's very cheap to run self-hosted these days even on your own HW. 1GB/20GB VMs cost $1-$2 per month.
Really, this should be an age of self-hosted if the cost was ever a limit.
But it's possible to run all kinds of other stuff, if you know how. All kinds of scratch your itch apps, monitoring, backup, small web apps, file sharing, audio server, seedbox, databases, etc. Stuff you'd not find a service for, because it violates copyright when it's not done for personal use, etc.
It's especially useful if there are multiple people in the household.
Most of what you list are or can be one-time costs. And most of it can be automated in a run-a-script, check for errors and forget about it in 1 minute, or deal with some failure in 15minutes.
The main benefit of running your own is that there are almost no ongoing costs. Lot's of the SaaS prices are really overblown, so running your own is appealing there.
And people spend time and stress on dealing with SaaS issues too from time to time, so it's not like you just pay and use without any additional costs.
It just needs a serious consideration.
Also running your own can be fun/fulfilling in its own way, because you now have more control and you're allowed more creativity. For some people that may ba a benefit too.
You can can indeed improve privacy, but it normally means giving up speed (like Tor).
Additionally, there are other issues of p2p as a main solution. For example, phone battery or often being blocked in routers of public spaces etc.
I think that a mix between Fediverse and P2P would be nice.
A power user can choose to be a node, knowing the price. But the common user would use some server/service to access it. But those must be planned such that switching is easy.
Amazon discovered they didn't have the rights to a book in Canada and deleted it off people devices. The book? 1984.
I think the iTunes issues have been fixed, but it's still stupid to not have your own backup independent of stuff accessible by "cloud" services.
I buy everything I can off bandcamp and download it to my machine. I occasionally buy off Amazon music, but I really hate it when that's the only option an artists has and would prefer to buy/rip a physical CD at a show. I keep my music on a 512GB microSD card (crazy these things exist now) and I always keep my own backups of my own content; buy DRM free whenever I can on Gog/Humble over Steam.
I prefer to have things I own, not licenses to software and content that can be revoked at any time.
Generally, if the book I'm looking for is sold DRM-free, I'll buy the ebook for convenience. Otherwise, I'll go look for a used paper copy.
I talked with support and they explained that as I had bought them when I was living in another country I could no longer download them.
EDIT: And to restore from backup you have to know you're missing it. They never gave me any errors or warnings. Just a few things were missing. They're basically gaslighting their users.
More seriously, what prevented an Apple user from uploading it on Torrents? Was it watermarked so Apple would find the culprit?
Steve Jobs argued for DRM free music as a means to interoperability instead of licensing FairPlay way back in 2007 in his “Thoughts on Music” post. He argued that most music was already DRM free and easily copied and only a small percentage of music on most iPods was bought from iTunes.
I don't much care for your argument, even if you're legally correct.
This would be less of an issue if the way people actually acquired music was still by buying the album, but that's not the case in the vast majority of people's experiences.
As opposed to music that is part of a subscription where you explicitly knew was being rented.
The way they sell these subscription services doesn't make it at all clear to the users what they are buying.
P.S. plus think about who this model helps the most. It's surely not the artists themselves, especially if the songs I know and love can't be played anymore. What artist would want their work to become inaccessible to those who love it?
The iTunes Music Store where you buy music and pay a one time cost has been around since 2003 and has been completely DRM free since 2009.
That’s like saying people don’t know content isn’t on Netflix forever.
What really offends me when music disappears while I'm paying monthly for the service.
TLDR; the entire subscription model is user hostile in most cases, like this one. And I'll argue it's also rather hostile to the artist here too.
If you don’t like music going away, especially with Apple Music, just buy the music you don’t want to lose and add it to your library. It integrates with the subscription service.
If I rent from the store I know how long I have. If I find something on netflix it could disappear while I'm still trying to get through it. If I save it chances are it won't be there in a few months.
In a far off land of yesteryear, you live happily and healthfully in a small settlement. Despite not being a farmer yourself you own a rooster who wakes you up in time for work every morning.
After years of being awoken by the same rooster, a salesman comes to you telling you of a fancy device which will wake you up at ANY time you wish, not just when the sun rises. You think, this is great! I'll buy one, and wake up later on the weekends (ironically forgetting you still own a rooster...) Of course you knew how to feed the rooster, but this magic device needs power and breaks sometimes... and the only person around to help is, of course, the same salesman. He goes way out his way for you at first, offering free power, and quick repairs. But as time goes on, and as the masses make use of these alarms, he's unable to keep up the same level of service to you. Well that and he's too busy spending all the coin you've given him.
Finally you find yourself with a dead rooster (oops) and a broken alarm clock, with the only repairman out on vacation, while you're missing work in the mornings. Sadly rooster alarm clocks have fallen out of style, and the thought of owning one sounds as crazy then as it does to us now.
First of all, you don't buy an alarm clock, you rent one and pay a monthly subscription. The salesman is all happy to elaborate on the benefits of this arrangement - you won't have to worry about batteries and repairs and such. You're a smart farmer, in your head a CEO of a farming corporation, so you buy the "capex vs opex" argument.
Secondly, the alarm clock doesn't break. You pay the fee, and it works. Except they replace it every two weeks with a slightly different one. Prettier, the salesman says. Over time it loses all the ergonomic handles and knobs, and becomes a flat pane of glass. Better UX, the salesman says. Sometimes weird things happen - you have an impression that it never shows 4:20 PM, or that alarms only fire on even numbered minutes. This may have to do with some contractual kerfuffle between the alarm clock provider and their "partners", because apparently time is intellectual property now.
Then one day you notice that the alarm clock has a camera and a microphone. When cornered, the salesman admits it had one from the very earliest model, and defends themselves by asking how else would they know how to make the product better (and no big deal about the 180 advertising partners; all they care about is making sure your day is even better by getting right products to you). Disgusted, you cut the microphone and tape up the camera (and get accused of stealing revenue from "honest companies").
Then one day your alarm clock bricks itself, because your government said or did something wrong in relation to oil prices and the US government decided your country can go to hell - and since your alarm clock is provided by a US company, it gets stuck forever showing 6:66 AM.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-th...
What are you referring to here? The switch to retina display which makes all the old photos seem fuzzy if displayed at the same "resolution" ?
One day, the provision of every electronic service in the world could be coordinated in a censorship resistant manner on the blockchain. Before that happens, the cryptoasset/blockchain space's software suite needs to be improved, with solutions to problems like stolen and lost private keys, and scalability needs to improve a few orders of magnitude, but seeing all of the development on dApps and smart wallets, and all the work happening to enable layer 1 sharding and to develop layer 2 scalability mechanisms like zk roll-up, I suspect it's inevitable.
Very true. I often gloss over that harsh aspect of reality.
The most basic proof of ownership is the fact of having that something, and there being no party claiming that you took it from them. Copying bits is so cheap everyone can get a copy from someone else who volunteered their copy and there's no point in even metering that. There's arguably little sense to have a market for digital data, yet we persist at trying. What you're seeking with blockchain is proof of compliance with a complex and somewhat arbitrary set of regulations.
I agree that intellectual property rights might reduce overall efficiency due to the artificial complexity and friction it adds.
And my chat service (iMessage) won't let me talk with outside people... yes I know SMS still works.
And my photos slowly become fuzzy, surely this is a bug when it happens, right!?
And my backups are in proprietary encryption file systems. Well I changed that by moving off macOS at this point.
What's next, I don't even want to imagine anymore.