I’ve been self-hosting it for about 10 years now. It’s a castle built on sand (PHP): It’s hard to install, hard to update, and becomes slower by the day, but once you have learned Docker, Apache, SSL and a bit of SQL, it works mostly reliable.

If you just want file syncronization you could just buy a hosted instance, and use Cryptomator for protecting your privacy. Then you can have Nextcloud in under 30mins.
If you want to store large amounts of data, or you also want to use Calendar, Collabora, Talk,… then self-hosting will be cheaper/more private. But it will require lot’s of learning, far more than the ordinary person can do.

Innovation and competition at it’s peak: You get to choose the color of your noose.

But (presumably) no cash or crypto because someone has to take a 3% cut.

Now it’s even more depressing because that means humans have been using children as a tool to create social security, knowing full well that most of them will suffer and die at an early age.

It’s a pyramid scheme played with (literally) innocent people at the expense of an insane amount of suffering and death.

The only thing Evil (aka. suffering, disease, war,…) needs to exist is that ‘good’ people continue to have children.

Not true. Humans always reproduced to the absolute limit (set by their agricultural technology and the bodies of women). The reason why this didn’t wreck the environment is because that limited population was too small to turn 50% of land into farmland, they didn’t know how to burn large amounts of coal and they didn’t have the technology to produce harmful chemicals.

But i agree that humanity (or any other species) has no value. Saying humanity has value is like saying the white race has value. It’s pure aestethics, it’s not worth it to make anyone suffer for that.

Suffering is bad, and the intentional or neglient creation of suffering is evil.

Those that have created suffering have done evil, and those that are currently creating suffering, or plan to create suffering are evil. The larger the suffering, the greater the evil.

Those that have done evil, but are no longer willing to do evil are not evil.

In the end, evil is a simplification that allows us to take power from those that want to create suffering without needing to know what exactly they are doing or planning.

In that case you would be creating a child (that did not exist before) as a tool to show to yourself (and maybe others) that you can do better than your parents. As the child had no problems before it’s creation, and now has many, that’s still not in the interest of the child.

The selfless thing to do would be to figure out if you would be an above-average adoptive parent. If you are or can be, then adopt a child that was created by someone else (maybe to show that they can do better than their parents, but life happened and they failed), and try to give them the best life possible in a society where everyone tries to outperform everyone else as the world is hurdling towards fascism and climate collapse.

Sadly election results prove every few years, that you are the only one seeking radical change.

~30-50% want extreme conservativism/capitalism. ~20-40% want everything as-is.
~30% want mild improvements like a really low UBI.
<5% want to get rid of oligarchs.
<.1% want to eliminate suffering.

There are 2 kinds of companies:

1. Evil companies
2. Companies that are not evil YET.

What this means in this case is that only your own E-Mail server running on a Raspi in your own home can be considered private or secure in the long run. Unfortunately this is really really hard to do, which is the only reason i have not done it yet.
Personally i do not consider any E-Mail private, because E-Mail is not E2E-encrypted, and 99.9% of times one side of the conversation is going to be hosted on some shady companies servers.

Of course Proton delivers a great service, because they make an insecure protocol a little less insecure, and i personally use Proton mail. Unfortunately their closed-source nature makes it impossible to switch providers without abandoning their great software.

As for services like Drive, they can actually be hosted privately and securely on your own Raspi with stuff like NextCloud/OwnCloud.
For those that can’t/don’t want to self-host, i would recommend paying for a hoster that hosts FOSS software and contributes to it either with money or code. In that case you would probably loose E2E-encryption, but gain the ability to switch providers once your provider turns on you. In that case at least some of your money would continue to offer value to you by having improved the software you are still using.