If you self-host all the same services you have the same exposure level if root on your hosting machine is compromised. I suppose it depends on how confident you feel in how agile you can patch if a vulnerability becomes known in postfix for example. I wouldn’t consider self hosting something that reduces your cybersecurity risk typically

But I don’t use those services; they still keep my data.

Exactly why we need data privacy laws. Sadly there are “profiles” out there for all of us, whether you chose to be tracked or not. Personally I think that any kind of sharing of personal data with marketers should be illegal nor should it be legal for any entity to purchase personal data without a signed consent form from the person in question.

That’d probably end “free” services and our credit score system in the United States but honestly that kind of data collection is equivalent to stalking and unethical.

There is a 3rd argument which I think is a bit more valid in “I value the service I receive in exchange for my personal data”

Using the internet without an adblocker, noscript, and whatever else is really nasty. But even if you aren’t on these platforms, marketers are still building profiles on you. Honestly we need data privacy legislation and some real talk about marketing and the costs of using the internet as a society.

I’m guessing he means how to sail the high seas without getting scurvy if you know what I mean

I think everyone has done this. I know I have. I believe I used dmda to recover all my photos back. Unfortunately I lost all the metadata for about 3000 photos. It took years to manually retap and redate them all but at least I didn’t lose them forever

The complex part isn’t the hosting part. Its the security part, the reputation management part, the uptime part, the troubleshooting delivery part and basically every other aspect other than running postfix+dovecot

Hosting your own email is a bad idea. Hosting OTHER PEOPLE’S email is a REALLY BAD idea. Self-hosting mail on a vanity domain is a good exercise to learn how SMTP, DNS, IMAP and other protocols interact.

If you don’t like Google, Apple, or Microsoft then sign them up with Proton or another hosted provider. You don’t want to be the reason someone lost income because they missed out on a critical email from a client or their job application was blocked because it was sent from a host with poor reputation.

The important thing is the package manager really. Then you can install and uninstall whatever DE you want

Cloudflare sells domains at cost. If you use apple devices and pay for iCloud+ ($1.99 a month for the cheapest plan), you can get email hosting for your domain for the entire family + a catch all address.

You can run an email host yourself but it is going to cost more in time and effort to maintain than just paying for hosting. It’s not very professional if your messages go to spam due to low reputation or if you miss a message/someone gets a bounce back because the container running your mail server was down and you didn’t realize

Run mail on a custom domain for fun, to learn what it takes, but don’t do it for mail that really matters

Apple is a hardware company first, not an advertising and services company like Google and Roku, and not a literal massive online retailer like Amazon.

Apple TV is the only one that doesn’t have ads on its home screen. I use an Apple TV to play all my physical media that has been ripped to mov and re-encoded with handbrake

I did the exact same thing 3 or so years ago. Thankfully I already had a backup but it was a bit nerve wracking to log in to next cloud and it was empty and then browsing the mount and having it also be empty

I think it’s mostly people viewing the “All”/“Community” feeds. Which I feel like you have to do in general as the niche communities haven’t really gotten to a self sustaining point where you can check your “Home” feed and not run out of stuff to doom scroll.

Not to mention that if you happened to mention certain things in communities that are tangentially related (Windows/Nintendo/Apple) then it usually starts another off topic discussion on linux/piracy/whatever.

Honestly the linux stuff doesn’t bother me as much as every topic seemingly turning into a critique of capitalism.