What I Self Host

There seems to be a fad for "self hosting" things now. What I don't understand is: what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly? For example, why can't the thing that connects to the Spotify API just... do that, from a program that runs locally, independent of a web browser, with a GUI created using a standard non-web GUI toolkit? Why would I want to use it by pointing my browser at a machine name (of another device I own) and port number, rather than by launching a dedicated program?

> what happened to just having a single device and having it run the code directly and show you the result directly?

Having access to multiple computers/devices as a single user became cheap and more common. If it was still the 2000s (or maybe early 2010s) and somebody only used a single PC for most of their tasks that'd make sense, but that's just not the reality most people live anymore

As far as I can tell, the price range for consumer PCs hasn't really moved since then. If anything it's worse now for people who expect to have a good quality graphics card. Owning a smartphone outright isn't cheap, either.