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?

Most people have many devices: phones, tablets, laptops, etc... so this makes that stuff accessible from anywhere. And if you lose your device, or it dies, you don't lose all your data. On that note: self-hosting allows you to centralize your backups.

I do have backup storage, of course.

It's hard for me to imagine wanting to use a phone for anything other than making calls or sending SMS; that's what I've been doing for many years now and I see no reason to change. But if I did have a tablet or laptop, I could just sync the program to it and run it locally. Maybe using, for example, good old rsync.

And I can't imagine being away from "home base" on a laptop for long enough (or using it for anything critical enough) to really worry about how to achieve "centralized backups". I'd rather not transmit that data over the Internet when I could just connect the laptop physically to my backup storage when I got home.