Independence. I’m done with relying on external service providers. They can’t be trusted. There is an inherent conflict of interests between commercial service providers and their users. It’s not in their best interest to provide the best service possible, it’s in their interest to provide a service that is barely better than the competition (if there even is any competition). That’s the reason why commercial services are never great and always just “meh”. I don’t want to rely on parties whose interests are against mine. Because sooner or later they will turn into shit.

Privacy, Education, Being Cool. Also, there are some services that are not available commercially.

Stuff can disappear or stop being free at any time for no reason, with no notice.

There’s no option for “all of the above” and also no option for “I just want to see the results”.

Cool and better - It’s cool when you got something working in your house and it’s better when it’s in your hands, rather than companies which declare limitless free storage for photos and videos, and then after some time and tens of gigabytes they decide to stop uploading more data, limit max size for file and charge you to pay for this service.
Nah, I’ll rather just buy this cool mini PC, components and storage for it once and will not pay infinitely for that sometimes changing crap service.

Education, sometimes better service, mostly because I just have fun with and regarding video streaming because I’m not willing to pay for every service existing.

i’ve got extra gear so why not put to good use?

I started for education, around 20 years ago. Then, the “main” reason shifted to cost for a short period, and is now privacy (albeit education and cost still being in line :-))

Can I do all of the above?

Cost is kind of in the grey zone for data/media hoarders. Like, I bought two 16tb HDDs and that cost me a pretty penny. I could have used that same amount of money for streaming services (or whatever) and relieve myself of the pain of tinkering. Partially, it’s about saying fuck you to the giant corpos in my own little way, and a little bit is about just knowing how to get what I need without paying for them which feels neat. Sometimes I feel a little guilty doing this but most media are shit anyway, and I buy the things I really like so that’s that.

What about “it’s a fun hobby” or “for learning purposes”?

For me it’s both Privacy, control and education.

The cloud is just someone else’s computer.

A mix of cost (questionable), education (less questionable) and coolness (not questionable)

I like control and i like to do cool things. There is a reason I never let a friend manage or host an event to an unhealthy point of being stubborn.

I love my Lychee server, I love my Bitwarden server and I love my Minecraft server. Allows me to simply share it and have no issue or worry of it being looked at.

Cost and privacy. Currently selfhosting adguardhome. Something like nextdns or controld cost like $35-40/year. Mine cost nothing monetarily since its hosted on oracle cloud free tier. Only costed me like an hour or two of my time to set it up. Plus i don’t trust them enough to not sell my browsing habit.