[dstillman]

See my comments on [1] for why we don't support self-hosting. Short version: it would pretty much just be an entirely different project.

> Syncing that to Zotero servers is kind of like giving back? I always thought that data might help improve Zotero's own auto-fill functionalities, which I'd like helping with.

No, we don't expose your data to anyone else. (And tools that try to do that usually just end up filling people's libraries with junk data.)

You should sync Zotero if you want to 1) access your library on other devices, 2) collaborate with others, and/or 3) have a real-time backup of your Zotero data.

[1] https://github.com/zotero/dataserver/issues/105