Meet The Self-Hosters, Taking Back the Internet One Server at a Time

I self hosted things before google and Facebook existed to harvest all the information, because at the time there weren't many choices. When google in particular began offering great alternatives, I switched.

The death of Reader was the catalyst that had me bring it all back home. That and the continual upping of costs without any significant change in service (Dropbox).

It definitely means more tinkering to tweak everything the way I want it. But, I have the option to tweak it and overall I'm much happier with it. On the other hand, when my teenage daughter sees me using my self-hosted Searx instance for searching, will ask me things like "why can't you just use google like a normal person?"