That is the title of a blog by Drew Lyton. The title is clickbait, but also something to think about. It has been written before by Moxie Marlinspike: Nobody Wants to Run Their Own Server. At Digitale Autonomie, we are of course of a different opinion.
After writing about how he set up his own home server, Drew came to the conclusion we have also drawn: it is not for everybody to install and maintain their own server. So he draws the conclusion a lot of other people have drawn:
"Instead of building our own clouds, I want us to own the cloud. Keep all of the great parts about this feat of technical infrastructure, but put it in the hands of the people rather than corporations. Publicly funded, accessible, at-cost cloud services."
He goes on:
"[...] in case you still aren't convinced, this entire system could still work entirely through the private market, through non-profits or cooperatives. And in our current political climate, I think this path is probably more likely to succeed than getting funding for libraries to start racking servers.
Because the self-hosted community is already doing this – just at the scale of individuals. What we need now from this vibrant community of smart, dedicated, part-time sysadmins is to think..."
At Digitale Autonomie we think there is a way to own your data. In Dutch law, owning data doesn't exist. You can own a piece of hardware. Any data on it is thus the property of the owner of the hardware. Therefor there are separate laws governing hosting. The most important being the Telecommunicatiewet or in English Telecommunication Bill. Drew talks about your data is owned by the provider so something similar is applicable in de US. He also says one could encrypt data. We think this would not solve the core of the problem.
So owning the hardware is indeed a good idea, but "nobody wants to run their own server." We think 'owning' is separate from 'maintaining'. This has been common practice for businesses for years. If you own a small shop or lets say small accountancy firm, you hire people to take care of systems the firm owns. Why can't people do that? We think a cooperative is the solution. This way, individual people can own their own server and buy maintenance collectively. All technology is available. We just need to configure it to serve people, and of course, all data will be encrypted.
Under Dutch law, we have a Civil Code that goes back at least 200 years, so property rights are well established, in contrast to digital rights or whatever you want to call it. There is a plethoria of regulations and laws in Europe: DSA, MICAR, GDPR etc.