Up front cost and maintenance time is the one that really gets you as things age and software packages get retired or require systemic updates that break other things in the system. Containerization helps a lot but isn’t perfect.

Risk of attackers getting on your la(w)n and ISP issues like no public IP I guess

It costs money, I don’t have time for that, I don’t want to take care of the security, I have other things to do.

Because they don’t know how? It’s not like most people are exposed to tech beyond mainstream apps, email, Word and maybe Excel. And quite frankly even as someone who does know how and who could afford dedicated hardware, I still can’t be bothered. It’s just not how I want to spend my time or money.

And that’s not even getting into potential security and liability issues.

I thought about it just as a local county wide area. Then I realized that hardly anyone outside of nerds knows what lemmy is, let alone reddit.

I plan on hosting my own mumble server when Discord shits the bed. I’m just having a private one for all my friends.

The lack of knowledge, which others here already pointed out, is only one part of it. I have a knowledge due to my education and work, but I really don’t want to. I selfhost the stuff, that I use personally and locally and access it through a VPN. But a ActivityPup Server, that would need to be reachable from outside, I really dont want to bother with.

Just doing a port-forwarding, like you suggested, is not a great idea security-wise, if you dont take additional precautions. You’d probably want the publicly hosted stuff in a completely different subnet from your LAN, that all your other devices use. Or at least have VLANs setup. All of which is not easily possible, or even impossible, with the standard consumer networking hardware most have at home.

Additionally, you’d need to take care of system and application updates, backups and so on, which takes a significant amount of time.

All in all I really don’t care enough about social media in general to justify the hassle.

Most people don’t make their own furniture, clothes, or ingredients either. It’s difficult, time-consuming, and requires a significant up-front (and ongoing) investment of money and of specialized knowledge that most people have neither the time nor care to deal with while managing the rest or their life.

It’s expensive. Sure you can start off with an old laptop, but soon you’ll want external storage to hold more images/media.

Then you’ll realize that if you just got a dedicated mini-pc you could host more containers. Oh! What if you get multiple identical PCs and then you cluster them for HA/zero downtime maintenance?!

Shit, but then you would need more than the little integrated 4 port switch on your Netgear router.

No matter! Switch to a virtualized pfsense, ditch the Netgear router and go for a 12 port switch.

Smash cut to a few years later when you’re spec’ing fiber switches/SFP+ for 10Gbps and Proxmox nodes with an extra 4GB ram so your ceph cluster doesn’t fall over randomly… Wait, why is my electric bill now $400/mo?

I’ve been seriously considering downgrading my homelab, but at this point between the *arr stack and Immich, I’m not sure if I can.

To make an apple pie from scratch you must first create the universe

I self-host Mastodon on a cheap VPS. It’s kind of a hassle. Just recently I found it running out of disk space because I followed an account that auto-boosts a lot of media. It was like 50gb per day of media cache. I unfollowed that account.

That’s a minor problem that didn’t even involve malicious activity. I’m going to keep self-hosting, but I have no trouble understanding why someone wouldn’t want the hassle.

I think some people just don’t like talking or boasting about their setups for security reasons 🤷‍♂️

I self host a cheap VPS but my main worry is keeping it secure and locked down. I’m not a security expert so while I use it to store and share files I don’t upload anything personal to it.

I self host a Nextcloud instance at home but it isn’t accessible from outside my local network. I want to keep it as secure as possible. I back up the files to three different mediums every couple of days and I think that’s the part a lot of non techie people might struggle with.

My wife’s doesn’t understand tech at all so if anything happens to me, she can unplug the storage box and plug it into a windows box via usb, giving her easy access to all the files. Anything more complicated than that and it’ll never work.

I would love to but the main issue is I don’t have motivation, the time to learn, or the money to set it up the way I’d like. I can’t even get a pihole running atm, despite trying. I once had a server on my old desktop but couldn’t even take the time to rip all my movies to Jellyfin. I’m also concerned about having all my stuff in one location (and if that’s the same with a corp then that doesn’t change with me self hosting 😬). I would love it for privacy but there’s a few options that are convenient and supposedly secure enough that I am willing to make the trust compromise. I would really like to own my router or set up that pihole though, but see first sentence :/

I agree more people should self host.

Disclaimer: I’m fediverse developer myself of Mbin. And also host all my services and websites.