Yep. 100% agree. I have a 175TB server. Sure it was expensive to set up initially, but I have all shows and movies I want, always. From all the different services I would have to subscribe to, I imagine I have recovered my initial outlay and I never have to worry about media being removed from the service or it going out of business.

I have things that aren’t even available if I wanted to subscribe. Best thing you can do for yourself.

No commercials, always high quality. Available anywhere, at any time.

And it’s so nice having zero dependence on the cloud. If the internet drops out, everything still works, including the mobile app.

Why do you need to host youtube-dl?

I did that for a while to try and learn about filtering malicious traffic from the network. Doing that long term would definetly change my life, but very much not in a good way. It’s a endless whack-a-mole game and the winning prize is that your ISP doesn’t give you a call weekly.

It took couple of weeks until the ISP first called and told me that I have malicious traffic coming from my IP. I explained the situation and their representative was very understanding and handled the thing as well as he ever could. I tried to adjust filters, blocklists and all the jazz which was pretty much a full time job already and I still couldn’t make it work on a sufficient level. I got another couple of calls from ISP (again, handled spectaculary considering I was pushing several hundreds Mbps dirty traffic out in the wild) and eventually they just plainly said that they’re forced to kill my connection if situation doesn’t improve. I ran a node without exit for a while but as that’s not a interesting thing to run I eventually shut it down to free resources for more interesting things.

If you have the time and knowledege to do that, I really encourage that, but for me it was too much to keep in the network while trying to maintain some sanity on my everyday life. I firmly believe that my goal of filtering malicious traffic out and keeping an exit node runnig is achievable goal, I just don’t have enough knowledge nor time to gain enough of it to keep exit node running.

And of course there’s legal issues as well and severity of them heavily depends on where you’re living, so really do your homework before doing anything like that.

As others have worded it, it’s a hobby. Self hosting is only necessary for a very small number of people, less than one percent of people on here, but it’s a fun hobby, and I’ve learned a lot about software and networks from messing with self hosting stuff.

for better or worse it is, (though I don’t recommend newcomers to boot up a bind server to manage their dns, pihole is probally the best starting point)

While Vaultwarden is great I would not suggest selfhosting your password manager unless you do regular backups. Losing all your password cause your server went down is a great way to ruin your day.