[overlisted]

Stuff like GitLab's or Docker's situation wouldn't happen if everyone self-hosted their own instances. This is yet another reason why centralization fails at scale: eventually some companies realize that they're giving free resources away to their users.

[8fingerlouie]

You're assuming that self-hosting is free, which i can certainly guarantee you that it is not. The only situation where it may seem like it's free is if you host for your own personal use.

For a business, somebody is getting paid to maintain self hosted servers on hardware (virtualized, on prem or in cloud) that are also not free, and besides the hardware cost you also have the cost of simply keeping them running.

For personal use, it is only free in the sense that you don't value your free time. Initial setup is the smallest part of it. If you intend on exposing your services to the internet, you also need to be on top of patching, reviewing logs and much more.

I've been self-hosting for decades, but these days i simply use whatever cloud offering fits my needs. It's usually cheaper, and/or much more resilient than what i had at home.

[yobbo]

Just by having a phone, you are self-hosting software on a machine with 8 cores and several gigabytes of ram. Yes, it's not free, but the marginal cost of an app is effectively zero.

Git on its own requires nothing in resources. I have an instance of gitea running in a container since many years. Its marginal cost now is less than $1?

[overlisted]

Yes. We need to develop easier ways of deploying self-hosted apps, which unfortunately isn't happening now because of a "I need demand to create demand" cycle that someone has to kick off. Panels like portainer are already a step in the right direction.