The personal server space is littered with failed startups.
Not because it's difficult to make turnkey personal servers. Embedded Linux hardware is unbelievably cheap.
They fail because they don't bring any benefit against real-world threats, but they come with significant downside risks.
If your house floods or your home server is burgled, your data is just gone. So your home server ends up backed up to the cloud anyway, and now you're maintaining a home server and a cloud server when you could have just used the cloud service for everything without the headache.
> Not because it's difficult to make turnkey personal servers.
It's crazy hard to make turnkey personal servers that will be usable by ordinary people.
> They fail because they don't bring any benefit against real-world threats,
For a vocal contingent online, real-world threats involve lack of control over hosting, over their data, over encryption. Your own servers would address (at least partially) all these problems, but of course, these are not problems that most people in the world using walled gardens even consider to be problems.
> So your home server ends up backed up to the cloud anyway, and now you're maintaining a home server and a cloud server
Utilizing an online/network backup service as part of running your own server is qualitatively different from running a server in the cloud.
> For a vocal contingent online, real-world threats involve lack of control over hosting, over their data, over encryption. Your own servers would address (at least partially) all these problems, but of course, these are not problems that most people in the world using walled gardens even consider to be problems.
Vocal? Yes, but my no means the majority.
I'm in tech running my own software company and I don't even want to upkeep centrally maintained hardware like my PlayStation. It's just a pain (often enough) and for the non-tech people in my life it's just barely tolerable.
Apple TV is the best, but it still has really problems that pop up now and then.
Not because it's difficult to make turnkey personal servers. Embedded Linux hardware is unbelievably cheap.
They fail because they don't bring any benefit against real-world threats, but they come with significant downside risks.
If your house floods or your home server is burgled, your data is just gone. So your home server ends up backed up to the cloud anyway, and now you're maintaining a home server and a cloud server when you could have just used the cloud service for everything without the headache.