[gaxun]

You can also call me a hypocrite. My MX records point to Google and my A record points to gitlab.com's GitLab Pages.

I'm actually not brave enough to open a few public ports on a server I own and manage and drive traffic there. It's a mix between "scared" and "it only took an hour to set up the entire thing the easy way."

But I can sleep soundly knowing that if any of the providers I'm currently using become incompatible, I can move things very quickly to a new location.

[__jal]

Take it at your own speed, when you're confident in your abilities.

Especially mail is difficult to get started with now - domains that don't have years of (spam-free) reputation tend to be blocked a lot, creating a bit of a chicken and egg issue[1] to get past, and it is... extremely frustrating to figure out what hoops j-random-webmail.com demands you jump through. Also, setup is complex, mainly due to the accretion of of anti-spam half-measures that need to junk up your DNS if you want people to accept your mail.

But trust me, even with all that, setting up mail today is still much easier than it was in the Sendmail days.

Assuming you're interested, and you want to, I'd encourage you to try running more services. When experimenting, don't keep private things on your host, make sure you have your machine access covered (passwords, keys, magic customer service phrases, whatever) and keep an eye on it. If it is compromised, consider it a learning experience and recreate your config (I'm assuming you're running a cheap virtual host; if this is hardware, that's a bit different).

It isn't that hard to do, and I think too many people are much more scared of running their own services than is sensible or real.

Netizens, arise! You have nothing to lose but your shackles.

And maybe some time that you otherwise would have wasted on Facebook.

[1] A few sites still block my domain, despite being single-owner, always spam-free and online for almost 20 years. I don't feel bad about not having them as potential conversation partners.

[ChoHag]

Setting up email is easier. Running email is harder.

Mostly because when running sendmail, well, nobody cared.

[detaro]

Having your own domain is a great start to be independent online: if you have a backup of all your content and don't use totally strange features of the underlying platform, you can easily move your content to whatever hosting you want while keeping your URLs intact.

If you want to look into what other people are doing with "my domain is (the center of) my social network", check out the community at https://indieweb.org – some clever ideas & tools around communicating updates etc between sites and integrating with existing social media where necessary.

[rsync]

"I'm actually not brave enough to open a few public ports on a server I own and manage and drive traffic there. It's a mix between "scared" and "it only took an hour to set up the entire thing the easy way.""

I love port knocking for this reason. You can take a baby step between not opening a port at all and opening it wide to the world ... for now, just open it up to yourself.

My sshd and personal HTTPS wiki are hiding behind knockd. I like the idea that they are simply invisible to the rest of the Internet.

[CaptSpify]

And, tbh, you should go slow. The internet is a wonderful place, but it is also terrible and dangerous.

I'm proud to run my own mail and webserver, but you do have to be careful