I’ve been self-hosting it for about 10 years now. It’s a castle built on sand (PHP): It’s hard to install, hard to update, and becomes slower by the day, but once you have learned Docker, Apache, SSL and a bit of SQL, it works mostly reliable.

If you just want file syncronization you could just buy a hosted instance, and use Cryptomator for protecting your privacy. Then you can have Nextcloud in under 30mins.
If you want to store large amounts of data, or you also want to use Calendar, Collabora, Talk,… then self-hosting will be cheaper/more private. But it will require lot’s of learning, far more than the ordinary person can do.

Innovation and competition at it’s peak: You get to choose the color of your noose.

But (presumably) no cash or crypto because someone has to take a 3% cut.

Good question. Where to put them, when the camps are full? How much money is it going to cost to imprison millions for life? Is there a more efficient solution?

Your brain right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA_uJOnAnoQ&t=1456s

… i did not speak out because premature Nazi comparisons diminish the Nazi crimes and are antisemitic.

We’ll have to wait for at least 5 million gassed before we can think about Nazi comparisons.

/s just in case.

They’ll do when they realize that’s the only way to fit 30,000 immigrants into a torture camp that can hold < 1000 inmates.

By May 2003, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp had grown into a larger and more permanent facility that housed over 680 prisoners, the vast majority without formal charges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

Yesterday, inspired by the news about mass depaorations, i watched a documentary on the Final Solution.

Among a lot of interesting things, one thing stood out to me: The original Nazis were afraid that the german people would not only reject genocide, but also reject the idea of jews (aka. their neighbors) being sent to brutal labor camps.
So they produced propaganda movies depicting the city Theresienstadt as a spa town. And then told the public that the jews would be sent there to be protected from the increasingly antisemitic public.

To lull victims into a false sense of security, the SS advertised Theresienstadt as a “spa town” where Jews could retire, and encouraged them to sign fraudulent home purchase contracts, pay “deposits” for rent and board, and surrender life insurance policies and other assets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_Ghetto

Nowadays, you can just tell the american people:

Hey, we are gonna send your neighbors to a torture camp. Great camp. Lovely camp. Most brutal camp of the world.

And they are like: Yessss, finally a solution to the migrant question.

I can also recommend Life Under Adolf Hitler: The First Years Of Nazi Germany.

…until the owners of that company realize how much more money they could make by introducing stuff like planned obsolescence.

Humans that have no price are really really rare.

There are 2 kinds of companies:

1. Evil companies
2. Companies that are not evil YET.

What this means in this case is that only your own E-Mail server running on a Raspi in your own home can be considered private or secure in the long run. Unfortunately this is really really hard to do, which is the only reason i have not done it yet.
Personally i do not consider any E-Mail private, because E-Mail is not E2E-encrypted, and 99.9% of times one side of the conversation is going to be hosted on some shady companies servers.

Of course Proton delivers a great service, because they make an insecure protocol a little less insecure, and i personally use Proton mail. Unfortunately their closed-source nature makes it impossible to switch providers without abandoning their great software.

As for services like Drive, they can actually be hosted privately and securely on your own Raspi with stuff like NextCloud/OwnCloud.
For those that can’t/don’t want to self-host, i would recommend paying for a hoster that hosts FOSS software and contributes to it either with money or code. In that case you would probably loose E2E-encryption, but gain the ability to switch providers once your provider turns on you. In that case at least some of your money would continue to offer value to you by having improved the software you are still using.