[DocTomoe]

A Raspberry Pi 5 already does all of the examples you mentioned. Add a hard disk o it, and a somewhat-reliable power supply, and you're looking at a hundred bucks. We are not that far away from that.

Does it replicate Netflix? No. But honestly, most people do not host videos on Netflix.

[monsieurbanana]

Now add raid storage, nobody should keep their photos and other important documents in a single drive, then at least double the price because you're not going to sell a raspberry kit to the general public but a polished product that needs almost no install steps. Or triple it, because you're also going to need tech support and updates.

And how are you going to reach your personal server? More and more people don't even get to have a public IP for their router anymore, and having every non-tech person punch a hole in their firewall to access their photos... I'm sure that's going to go well.

And if you somehow manage to do that, how are you going to share your photos in your personal server with your friends? Because that's pretty high in people's needs.

[DocTomoe]

There is always a way to make things more complicated and/or expensive. That is not the goal of the exercise, though.

[monsieurbanana]

What I listed is not optional, it's the bare minimum if you want to have a widely-adopted self-hosted solution for someone's digital life.

If you're going to recommend your non-tech family store all their photos in raspberry with a single hard drive with no backup, that's kind of evil.

[em-bee]

a cheap virtual host with a reverse tunnel...