One of the things that the "computer revolution" spawned in the 90's was that there were a lot of "extra" computers around because everyone upgraded every 18 - 24 months. After a couple of rounds of upgrades, if you had kept the old parts, you had enough parts around to make another computer. In my house this typically became the "kids" computer and we would build it, them image it, and then use the image to restore it back to what ever it had been built to originally when the kids did something to make it non-functional.
Of course after a still longer period you had upgraded that "previous" gen computer and now you had a left over previous previous gen computer. And typically what I did was put Linux on it and have it for running this that and the other thing. These days a RasPi 3 is about as powerful as that generation -2 computer was.
Like a lot of people as my Internet speeds increased I started leaving computers on all the time as servers that I could access from anywhere. This was made easier (and without paying extra for a fixed IP) with dyndns, although these days it is easier still with IPV6 (no dyndns required if your ISP will give you an IPV6 prefix (so far this has been pretty easy).
So I think a number of services you use "in the cloud" might be implementable as local services where it is harder for the Government to get its hands on your data, (or at least it would have to serve you with a warrant and so you would know they were looking at you, an NSL doesn't work if the person being served is the person being observed :-)