[diafygi]

The third party doctrine.

Unfortunately, it's unlikely that we (at least in the US) will find the political will to change the law that says if you give your data to a third party, it is no longer protected by the fourth amendment and doesn't require a warrant to obtain.

So self-hosting your own data seems to be the only way you can keep your data protected by the fourth amendment.

[Carpetsmoker]

Not everyone feels all their data needs that kind of protection though. And it doesn't really apply to some services, for example, everything I do on GitHub is already public anyway.

[augustl]

A good example would be things like a todolist app and other personal things. It would be nice to make an app like that without having to also scale an entire set of servers and just have the syncing etc be provided by the user of the app instead of by me.

Something like that could even be integrated into iCloud if it becomes popular. Then your "user provided server" would probably only work with other Apple products, Apple style. But for many users that would probably be good enough.

And you wouldn't be limited to having only one of these "user provided server thingies", either.