Given 5–7 years ago when I began self-hosting to now, I would say that things have changed dramatically. Think about how the services we use keep getting more expensive and the content we watch gets removed and becomes lost media. In that regard, self-hosting is a great source of preservation, although it is its own challenge, of course, as you're maintaining the infrastructure of all the media. As to how you do that, it can be incredibly expensive, down to a single drive dying and you losing all your data! While it goes both ways, the convenience of streaming services such as YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify makes things much more approachable; there is always a trade-off you're taking such as cost, privacy, and uncertainty of keeping your library if they choose to remove it. Privacy, I mentioned, right? Well, that is also a topic to think about. Let's see how many data breaches have been compromised each year to cause significant damages and cost to your privacy for us as consumers and businesses. Well, from multiple trusted sources like https://cmitsolutions.com/blog/cost-of-a-data-breach/, we can conclude confidently it costs companies millions per data breach in lost revenue. This, as a result, impacts trust in the company and can incur legal troubles and massive fines. And another massive data breach occurred earlier this year with Discord and its partner Persona (source: https://fortune.com/2026/02/24/discord-peter-thiel-backed-persona-identity-verification-breach/), which lost over 70,000+ users' age verification information; as a result, people are now more at risk of fraud, scams, impersonation, and other concerns.
So, what can we do, you might ask? Well, host it yourself, I would say if it were me, but then you have to understand the average person isn't going to be very understanding of security best practices, and we can conclude they might be worse off doing it themselves. So, what then can we do? A middle ground could be using Signal, where there is end-to-end encryption and has even been raided by the F.B.I. and they recovered practically nothing (source: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1385086-the-fbi-asked-signal-to-hand-over-user-data-signal-complied-by-giving-them-nothing/), and it's easy to use whilst not hosting it yourself; it is better than most options on the market today in my opinion. For more advanced users, you could look into Matrix, Rocket.Chat, Zulip, Mattermost, just to name a few.
In conclusion, if you are more of a casual user, use Signal; if you are more tech-savvy, try out some of the few ones I've listed perhaps?
- Alexander Goyette