A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I'm old enough to consider the framing of the question to be weirdly loaded.
It does not feel that long ago where people would be asked to justify entrusting their product's functions and data to a bunch of strangers who can make unilateral decisions about your service with zero comeback. Now we're being asked to justify not doing that.
Have you thought about contacting Louis Rossmann? He created an extensive video guide on how to self host using FOSS. Perhaps he'd be willing to highlight your survey to his over 2 million subscribers.
That's a good idea, and maybe even Henry from Techlore.
I self host for the same reason I'm not clicking some random link: distrust lol
um.si is for University of Maribor in Maribor, Slovenia. It looks legit.
If I have a file, I have it.
If google has my file, they say they have it. I'm told it's there. For how long? I dunno. Private? Hell no. Forever? Likely not.
This small discrepancy is the entire drive behind me selfhosting.
I'm a minimalist with selfhosting, a raspberrypi with a vpn connection, syncthing and a samba share is all most anyone really need-needs.
Done. Nobody else wants to know why I have 3 RasPi’s running stuff around the house, so I get to tell you in the survey, lol.
I want to know 👉👈
I was kind of surprised by my answers when I stopped to reflect. I realized I:
Anyway, I hope the results are useful! I don't know if you've done it already, but it would be interesting to compare results from different sources, like Lemmy vs Reddit or wherever you posted it.
Filled in the survey. A few notes:
There are also scenarios where I have already found something that's the best solution for my case, so I won't even bother looking at something new, even if it might be the best thing since sliced bread for someone else.
TIme and effort setting up/maintaining (4 questions). It doesn't take much time nor effort to set anything up now, but it did when I was starting out initially. I knew very little and a bunch of concepts hadn't clicked, yet, so it took me days to set up Nextcloud and about half a year (on and off. Probably a week or so if it were all squeezed together) for email.
The performance and intent to use in the future questions are weird - they feel like the same question, just leveling off in intensity. I've selected the same answer for all of them. They probably should've been a single question with agree/disagree options swapped for intensity levels.
Good luck with your PhD!
Because I dont need to pay rent for my files and I don't have to worry about AI and VCs trying invade my privacy.
Hmm. The first section about cloud service providers is a bit weird to me. There are providers which "keep my best interests in mind" as part of their business model, backblaze would be one. Their whole idea is to provide a good backup services. Encrypting my data before transit also doesn't make me worried that it will be accessed by them or any of their employees because they will only get some garbled mess.
Compare that to google, another cloud service provider. Their business model is to make money by selling me ads (foremost), they do that by gathering as much data as possible. Here all my answers would be negative.
This puts me in an awkward spot where I nearly every time answer with "Neither agree nor disagree", because there is more to it and not because I don't have an opinion.
Thank you very much for your thoughtful feedback!
You’ve raised an important point: cloud service providers are not all the same, and their business models can significantly influence how much trust users place in them. We fully agree that there's a big difference between providers like Backblaze, whose value proposition is built on privacy and reliability, and companies like Google, where monetization often relies on extensive data collection.
The purpose of this section in the survey is to explore general perceptions and motivations behind, not to evaluate individual providers. However, we understand that this generalization can be limiting — especially for respondents who distinguish clearly between different types of services and trust models. Your situation, where you answered "Neither agree nor disagree" not out of indecision but due to the complexity of the issue, is very insightful.
Thanks again for taking the time to share this, it’s greatly appreciated!
Felt that too. Its throwing all providers in one bucket which makes it very hard to judge
I had a hard time answering these because my opinion on cloud service depends on the cloud. (Google vs nextcloud for instance)
Good Luck Luka!
I feel like I'm a minority in this group in that I really don't like self hosting but I do it anyways because it gives me the things I want from a content/privacy/control/ownership perspective.
The thing I don't get about these self-host apps is why so many of them exist when the thing they do would be better to implement as a run of the mill offline program.
I just want to auto-import recipes from websites into a cookbook app without any fuss. We do not need to bring a server into this equation!
When making an application instead of coding for one platform you have to code for 5 and also convince Apple and Google to accept your app (Nextcloud is really feeling this one).
Meanwhile HTML + JavaScript works on most smart fridges.
Done.
I feel that it may be helpful to try to capture the motivation for each type of service.
For example. The reasons I host a media server are different than the reasons I host a photo backup solution.
Thank you for doing this research. I dream of the day that self hosting becomes as easy as spinning up a consumer router.
This survey doesn't distinguish between levels of cloud service provider, so I was a little confused.
Virtual private servers, cloud virtual servers (like AWS), cloud-based software where you provide code or a program and the cloud system runs it on a server of its choosing, and cloud-based systems where someone else provides the software (like Google Docs).
Shouldn't the control questions / variations of the same be a bit scattered? For me they were all packed together.
Good luck on the thesis and I hope my data points can assist your research! I'm sure the community would love to see your finished thesis when it is done
@SelfhostedResearch Done. But I found the survey design redundant and repetitive. Could demotivate people to complete ;(
Done. Are you going to be sharing the results here? That would be cool.
Thank you very much – I really appreciate your participation! Yes, the results will be published as part of my PhD dissertation, and also in one of the peer-reviewed journals in the field of Computer Science. Once everything is finalized and publicly available, I’ll definitely share a summary and a link to the publication here as well. Thanks again for your interest and support!
Yeah, those data questions are really loaded. I don't host for privacy or what not. It's because of a learning objective, to study, experiment, and run automated stock trading algorithms. I don't exactly have anything to hide from private companies.
Done but I felt lots of questions to be very similar. Maybe there is a form platform that can show only a subset of control questions for every survey.
Thank you for completing the survey and for your thoughtful feedback. The similarity between some questions is intentional and follows common scientific practice when measuring complex or abstract concepts. Using multiple, slightly varied items that target the same construct increases the reliability and validity of the data by capturing subtle nuances and reducing the influence of random response variation. While your suggestion to show only a subset of such items through adaptive platforms is valid and worth exploring, fixed item sets are generally preferred in research settings to ensure consistent and robust measurement. We appreciate your input and will consider it in future survey design improvements.
To be honest, if 3-4 questions in a row had same-ish wording, I just replied the same thing 3-4 times.
Many of my self hosted solutions are just DIY cludges. I was talking to a friend of a friend on Saturday about media streaming and he told me all about his Jellyfin setup and then asked about mine and I was just like "I just store MP4s on an SSHFS drive and play them in VLC on my TV (which runs Linux Mint)." When the survey asked about the various types of software I was like "No... I don't use anything like that... wait... yes I do! I just don't use a prebuilt solution!"
