[joekrill]

Most people have many devices: phones, tablets, laptops, etc... so this makes that stuff accessible from anywhere. And if you lose your device, or it dies, you don't lose all your data. On that note: self-hosting allows you to centralize your backups.

[zahlman]

I do have backup storage, of course.

It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS; that's what I've been doing for many years now and I see no reason to change. But if I did have a tablet or laptop, I could just sync the program to it and run it locally. Maybe using, for example, good old rsync.

And I can't imagine being away from "home base" on a laptop for long enough (or using it for anything critical enough) to really worry about how to achieve "centralized backups". I'd rather not transmit that data over the Internet when I could just connect the laptop physically to my backup storage when I got home.

[bigstrat2003]

> It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS

Not even listening to music in the car? That is probably my #1 phone use case by far outside of the communications functions you mentioned. I run a Navidrome server at home, and while on the go my phone can stream any music I like from the home server (so I don't need to load it in advance). In theory one might store the music on one's phone of course, but I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.

[zahlman]

> Not even listening to music in the car?

I generally prefer to have access to all my senses on public transit, but there are any number of other portable devices I could use that store the music locally.

> I have more music than my phone will hold and it's very nice to be able to access whatever I want to listen to at will.

If I were going to choose from among that much music I might as well search the Internet anyway. An entry-level microSD the size of my thumbnail now holds a couple hundred CDs worth (at uncompressed CD quality; several times that for high-quality opus).

[mervz]

You seem to be an extreme outlier and probably not the target audience for such applications. No offense, but nobody is carrying around multiple devices when the one device we all have can do everything and do it better.

[ZoomZoomZoom]

How come the connection is stable enough to be streaming on the go from the car? Or is there some serious caching happening?

[com2kid]

MP3s are tiny. Just download + cache the n and n+1 song. On a modern 4g or 5g connection downloading an entire song takes seconds. Anytime a new song starts up, grab the n+1 song as soon as possible.

But aside from that, inside any metro area even a 200ms or so buffer would likely suffice for streaming music.

[ZoomZoomZoom]

Yep, and OPUS files are even lighter. That's why I just sync a "currently listening" music folder with Syncthing and do not think about connection, caching and all that. (I have the rest reachable when I need it, of course.)

200ms and even n+1 won't cut it for a subway, a semi-basement pub, a tunnel, a train or an airplane trip, a hike, a countryside visit, etc.

[lucyjojo]

well then you have a very niche use of your computing devices.