As I mentioned, I didn’t really know where to post it. I guess my lemmy-foo isn’t up to snuff. I saw that this appears to be in lemmy.world, but only 10 options came up when I tried to post and none of them really seemed right. Advice?

Thank you for the thorough response. After looking carefully at what you wrote I didn’t really see a difference between the term self-hosting and home network.

You said you have software that automatically downloads media. The way I see this using movies for instance, if I own the movies and have them on my machine, then I can stream them over my network and have full control. Whereas if I “own” them on Amazon and steam it from there, they can track the viewing experience, push ads, or even remove the content completely. I understand that… But if I want a NEW movie, I’m back to Amazon to get it in the first place (or Netflix, or Walmart, etc. I get it). I’m fact, personally I’ve started actually buying disks of the movies/music I like most so that it can’t really be taken away and I can enjoy it even without an Internet connection. Am I missing something? Unless of course the media you are downloading is pirated.

I know I’m asking what seems to be a huge question but I’m really only asking for a broad description, sort of an ELI5 thing.

Wow! Thank you all for the civilized responses. This all sounds so great. I am older and I feel like I’ve already seen enough ads for one lifetime and I hate all this fascist tracking crap.

But how does that work? Is it just a network on which you store your stuff in a way that you can download it anywhere or can it do more? I mean, to me that’s just a home network. Hosting sounds like it’s designed for other people to access. Can I put my website on there? If so, how do I go about registering my domain each year. I’m not computer illiterate but this sounds kind of beyond my skill level. I’ll go search Jellyfin, weird name, and see what I can find. Thanks again!

I’ve never posted on Lemmy before. I tried to ask this question of the greater community but I had to pick a community and didn’t know which one. This shows up as lemmy.world but that wasn’t an option.

Anyway, what I wanted to know is why do people self host? What is the advantage/cost. Sorry if I’m hijacking. Maybe someone could just post a link or something.