My friends are surprised when I show them my little raspberry PI on which I have running two social media instances, two search engines, Nextcloud, XMPP, email and some other services for a dozen people. I explain that my services don't have any advertising, blockchain, surveillance, or data mining which massively reduces the amount of resources needed. We are all in the same town which shortens the data transfers. My phone also stays powered for days since it is using primarily my local services and no Goopple. This is a secure, private, and lower carbon solution I hope more people employ.
Do you have any write-up about your setup? I've been interested for a while in self hosting myself at home, but things like security and such are quite confusing and conflicting at times, I find.
I'm not totally convinced tracking/data mining is the key distinction here. I'm going to assume your dozen users are friends/family and 'well behaved'. Global cloud services do not have that luxury. They have to deal with wide ranging usage, sophisticated attacks, bots etc that you simply don't have to deal with.
In short, they have a vast set of requirements you don't have, each one of which adds complexity.
Dont get me wrong, I definitely agree with your message. However I think we need to be clear that a raspberry pi running some services is not the equivalent of cloud services without 'advertising, tracking etc'
Yes it is a different scale with different needs. It is noncommercial for friends and family. It is private cloud services at a small scale with appropriate security and backup measures.
