Selfhosted services like Nextcloud/Immich aren’t nearly as dependent on a critical user mass like Discord/Matrix, but the principle is the same.

If you host for family or friends, they may even use it if you convince them to switch. But when the setup, which doesn’t consist of redundant instances and isn’t maintained by a small army of SysAdmins 24/7, inevitably breaks for longer than a few minutes, most will switch back to the easy, reliable option.

I’d love to be able to disagree in any of your points, but I can’t.

The vast majority of users want something that simply works, is polished and intuitively usable. Reading docs, remembering anything other than the bare minimum, running into issues that don’t get magically resolved within 5 minutes will turn them away forever.

Even people with a technical background will at least partially compromise and migrate towards the services with the most users to not isolate themselfs.

Matrix is neat, Lemmy is neat, Nextcloud is neat (well, in theory), Immich is neat, so many other privacy friendly solutions are neat. But they’ll always be irrelevant in the global context.

What? So your advice for improving privacy is to not use a VPN, because the provider may log stuff and instead keep accessing stuff directly through your ISP who will log everything you do and simply use DNS over HTTPS/TLS, which does pretty much nothing for your privacy since your ISP still sees the servers you connect to?

That’s terrible advice.

Mullvad certifiably doesn’t log. Their VPN infrastructure even transitioned to RAM-only a few months back. They’ve been raided by the police and nothing was confiscated because there was nothing to confiscate. Obviously they have a list of registered accounts and payments, but without any connection to - well, connections.

I get what you mean though and mostly agree: There are only a few providers I trust enough to shift said trust from the ISP to them.

As mentioned in the comment you replied to: Yes, trusting a third party is a compromise. But you are also trusting a third party when renting a server for a private VPN endpoint, as well. A third party provider with probably a lot more logging going on than a trusted service such as Mullvad. While being way more exposed.

Since TOR isn’t feasible for most users 24/7, trusted commercial VPNs are the next best thing when the alternative is your ISP logging everything you do.

This is something I’ve not understood yet. If you rent a server somewhere to use as a private VPN endpoint, your clear IP will be pretty much the only one connecting to the server. Correlating your traffic and your clear IP to your masked IP is easy for sufficiently motivated, able actors.

Meanwhile, the main benefit of a shared VPN such as Mullvad is that many users simultaneously use the same endpoint, making it much harder to identify the user (taking only IP and traffic into account), provided they don’t log your traffic.

So while having control over your endpoint is nice, how does that actually contribute anything meaningful to your privacy?