Silicon Valley has spent years convincing us that our digital lives are too complicated for mortal hands. Passwords? Backups? Updates? Leave it to the grown-ups at Google, Dropbox, or Spotify. Just sign here, agree to a privacy policy you’ll never read, and we’ll handle the rest.

Then comes the counterculture: self-hosting. It’s the rebellious cousin at the tech family reunion, the one who decides they’d rather run their own email server than hand it over to a trillion-dollar ad company.