This is a fallacy, as self hosting means you remain at the whims of receiving or interfacing systems. Does you hosting your own email change the concentration of email accounts hosted at Yahoo, Microsoft, and Gmail? It doesn't. Does hosting your own domain or website change Cloudflare's concentration and centralization of internet traffic? It doesn't. You vote with your dollars by picking providers who won't lock you in, you vote with your dollars by picking protocols over platforms that cannot lock you in.

Paying Fastmail, along with others who do so, means Fastmail will remain as a non Big Tech option, for example (they also developed and championed, JMAP, for a more efficient user experience). Paying Kagi means Kagi will remain as a non Big Tech option. Donating to Let's Encrypt means Let's Encrypt will remain as a public good independent of Big Tech. I could go down the list of every service I pay for to de-Google and de-Big Tech, but that's likely unhelpful to further demonstrate the point.

> We are all paying for it, down the line.

Indeed, so establish and fund organizations that provide systems and services for benefit vs profit and control that cannot be captured. Self hosting your own box at home helps you (which is totally fine and reasonable, I run my own on prem infra across two continents at small business enterprise scale for use cases I cannot procure commercially at reasonable cost), but does nothing else, and doesn't scale.

(think in systems)