Exactly. Just like any other kind of proselytizing, it’s better to just live by example and answer questions as they come. For example:

• personal finance - manage finances properly, and people will notice that you’re not stressed about money
• religion/philosophy - live a worthwhile life and demonstrate the value it brings to your life
• products - use them and mention them when relevant (e.g. my coworker loves their Remarkable and shills it at every opportunity)

People aren’t going to change their behavior because you’re pushing something on them, they’ll change their behavior if they see something they want more than what they have. I think more people should self-host, but I don’t get anything from others switching, nor do I have much control over them deciding to switch.

That’s fair. I’m making the comparison to other hobbies. If someone is not interested in roller skating, but decides to try it out because one of their friends really likes it and invites them, they may find they enjoy it… or not, which in that case they won’t go again, which is fine. Alternatively, they find a new hobby they enjoy, and selfhosting could give skills that turn into a potential career, but that’s if they really enjoy it. I don’t think it’s uncommon for friend groups to have outsiders (me) and “force” them into trying new things, but maybe my comparison doesn’t hold up here as this is a bit less about socializing.

more specific to a subset of people who have time to bother

And that subset of people needs to have at least some kind of mindset to learn the viable minimum skills to even start with and a will to learn more and more and more. I’ve done various kinds of hosting as a career for couple of decades and as things change I’m fighting myself if it’s worth my time and effort to keep my home services running or should I just throw money to google/apple/microsoft/whoever to store my stuff and manage my IOT stuff and throw the hardware into recycling bin.

I have the skill set required for whatever my home network might need up to a point that I could somewhat easily host a small village from my home (money is of course a barrier after a certain point), but I find myself more and more often thinking if it’s worth the effort. My Z-wave setup needs some TLC as something isn’t playing nicely and it causes all kinds of problems with my automations, my wifi network could use a couple of sockets on the walls to work better, I should replace my NVR with something open source to include couple of more cameras around the yard and have better movement recognition and cameras should go to their own VLAN and so on.

Most of that stuff is pretty basic to set up and configure (well, that z-wave network is a bit of it’s own thing to manage) and it would actually be pretty nice to have all the things working as they should and expand on what I have to make my everyday life even more simpler than it already is. But as there’s a ton of things going on in life I just rather spend few hours gaming from my sofa than tinker with something.

That’s of course just me, if you get your reward and enjoyement on your network then good for you. Personally I think I’ll keep various things running around, but right now in this place I’m at, the self hosting, home network and automation and all that is more of a chore than a hobby. And I’m pretty sure I don’t like it.

Can I be your friend?

I’d offer to be your friend, but how dare you use ${DISTRO1} when ${DISTRO2} is clearly the better choice!

Also, last week you asked a question that someone else on the internet previously asked. You monster!