> We need to do what we preach
You start.
edit: I have no idea what people think they're talking about when they're like "people should just" and "you should just." The cage is not all in your mind, dude; it's an actual cage, guarded by people with guns.
Not OP, but I am self-hosting a bunch of things, like my blog. I am trying to move away from Google, my primary email for important things is under my domain (not purely self-hosted, but still). I am also creating backups so that I can recover if a service is gone for any reason.
So yea, some of us are practicing what we preach.
Exactly, I've stopped worrying so much about what "everyone" is doing, and just continue to do my own thing. I've self-hosted E-mail and web for 15+ years at this point. I keep my music and movies on spinning metal in my garage with an NFS server running on it. Photos stored locally too, and everything backed up on my own storage. I don't care how locked-in Spotify keeps you, because I don't need Spotify. I don't care how much data Netflix collects, because I don't use it.
It's always fun to read articles about how urgently we need to go back to local-this and self-hosted that, knowing I never left!
Sorry, what? There are people with guns preventing us from self hosting websites? That’s certainly news to me.
Not simple website hosting, but if you want to do something like running social media, there are a bunch of regulations in the way that used to not exist, and regulations are enforced by people with guns (who are called police officers).
> regulations are enforced by people with guns
In what country?
In all the ones I know of, regulations are enforced by courts, without the use of guns or violence.
Posting these kinds of hot takes every day are probably why you got shadowbanned.
All of them that I'm aware of. There's generally a series of escalating actions, the last few of which involve direct physical violence against you. The only reason to comply with any of the earlier stages is the threat of direct physical violence from the later stages if you don't. Without that threat, the whole idea of being forced to do something collapses, since you can just completely ignore what the law is demanding you to do.
Sometimes the last stage in a chain of potential escalations is some kind of deprivation instead of violence. For example, if I get money taken from my bank account to pay a fine, and I only planned to use that money to buy a really big TV online, then now I don't get a really big TV, which is a punishment, but not a violent one.
But that's actually quite rare. It doesn't work with a brick-and-mortar store, because there would still be more stages of escalation available, where I could take the TV from the store without paying and then men with guns would come after me. It also doesn't work if I was going to buy food with the money, since starvation is a form of torture. It also doesn't work if I was going to pay rent with the money, since eviction is violent. Only relatively few escalation chains end in non-violent deprivation.
With fictitious legal entities it's more likely to end without harm to any natural entities. The last stages of the chain of enforcement against a corporation can be to transfer ownership to a different natural person, followed by dissolving it entirely. Both of those are just pushing words around on paper, and nobody gets a black eye. On the other hand, one could argue that dissolution is to a legal person what the death penalty is to a natural person, and we only just don't care as much legal people aren't real. I don't think have any ethical qualms with metaphorically murdering a corporation by writing a legal document saying it no longer exists, but it actually supports my point, that even against fictitious entities, escalation chains end with something analogous to shooting the corporation in the head.
Metaphorical guns, but yes. And if needs be, actual ones.
Ok, done. You next.