Last winter I moved family photos off Google Photos to Immich on an old Dell Optiplex 7040 in the closet (Proxmox, Immich, Nextcloud, Matrix). Main reason was Google One kept getting more expensive.
Tech part works. Immich is great, Nextcloud is fine.
People part doesn’t. My wife uses it because she has to, but she still brings up January when I almost lost a month of kid photos due to no real backup. My sister is still on Messenger, my mom is on iCloud, so my Matrix server is mostly just me and wife.
I have backup now (USB + B2) and cost is lower than Google One, but time cost is higher and family adoption is low.
For those who self-host for family — how did you actually get them to switch and stick? Did you force it, make it invisible, bribe with something, or just accept that they will stay on Google / Messenger / iCloud?
What worked for you with non-technical family?
You can’t. You can’t make people like something just because you’ve discovered that it’s amazing.
My wife is a technophobe and makes a point of commenting on any time my selfhosted stuff doesn’t work right (even though it’s unrelated to my server, like our ISP shitting itself).
I’ve personally installed and logged into Jellyfin on all of my mother’s and wife’s devices and neither of them uses it and both go back to Netflix (with ads!).
My parents won’t use Signal and dont see the point of installing another app besides WhatsApp.
I’ve Ihad to install firefox+adblock on my father’s laptop and replace the desktop icon with an edge icon to get him to use it.
Even my brothers (who are as tech savvy as me) would not de-Google or start self-hosting after a year of me telling them how awesome it is, until they eventually discovered it for themselves.
You can’t make people. Tell them about it, introduce the idea and demo it. That’s all you can do.