Hold on to Your Hardware

A warning about rising prices, vanishing consumer choice, and a future where owning a computer may matter more than ever as hardware, power, and control drift toward data centers and away from people.

マリウス

The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's
servers.

Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of
managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None
of this requires expensive hardware, it just requires caring enough to set it up

Depending on someone else's servers isn't that different from depending on someone else's software, which unfortunately we all must do. Unfathomable reams of it, with a growth curve that recently went vertical. I guess the crucial difference is that someone else's servers can be taken away in a flash, while someone else's (FOSSl software can't.