I don't think this really deserves to be downvoted does it? Even if it's simplified. And I say that as someone who is in a tiny fraction of the population in te

I don't think this really deserves to be downvoted does it? Even if it's simplified. And I say that as someone who is in a tiny fraction of the population in terms of having my own fairly serious business TrueNAS system at the core of my data story, behind an OPNsense firewall on a fairly fancy network setup and with also my own offsite backups and Backblaze B2. I'm working on upgrading my ESXi system too, continuing to take more stuff self-hosted. And I'm pretty happy with it all, as well as any other benefits it's just plain faster to do stuff locally. But it's definitely fundamentally more expensive because there are tons of fixed costs that would be much better amortized across more parties. The hardware could handle far more than I throw at it, and importantly the incremental cost of expanding the setup is much much lower then the setup cost. My NAS could easily have nearly triple the storage space at "only" the cost of the drives themselves and maybe a bit more memory (which is dirt cheap). It's not processor or bandwidth limited. I don't need that much space, but if there were another few folks joining me on using it and we split the cost between us we'd each pay less for more. And the whole thing as-is leans heavily on my own personal amortization and professional knowledge, I can justify some of it as a business expense and I actually already knew tons of the basics before doing anything for the first time. A larger group could have someone devoting even more time to it. That's the simple relentless logic behind "cloud services" really behind whatever layers of fancy marketing or conversely outrage. It really is cheaper at a basic level, but unfortunately the way it's often been implemented lends to centralization and perverse incentives. Efforts to address it have to tackle those head-on. Ideally at a minimum there'd be legally mandated offering of standard "cloud APIs" for every platform so that iCloud or whatever could be slotted right out for something else compatible. It does seem like there is potential for more decentralized sharing and discovery, but the UI and reliability challenges are quite significant. We'll probably see a lot of gyrations back and forth as everyone searches for the right balances depending on their own situations along with whatever semi-ignorant semi-opportunistic bumbling responses governments come up with. Unfortunately even on HN lots of people tend to reach for sledgehammers over scalpels when it comes to the law.