Now that I’m all consolidated here on my main blog, I took another look at a list I built back when I started the Reclaim project (after seeing Boone Gorge’s post).
The Reclaim project really started as a way to reign in ephemeral media. But it changed into something else…
So, I’m really hosting all of my own stuff now, except for a couple of email address (one for work, the other non-self-hosted accounts are mostly inactive), twitter, and Facebook. So far, it’s working out pretty well. I don’t have to think about what some company’s going to do to a service that I rely on. My stuff is self-contained, and portable. I can move it relatively easily to another server. It takes advantage of a fancy schmancy content delivery network as part of my hosting package. And I’m only using a tiny fraction of the server resources (storage, CPU, bandwidth, etc…) that I have available.
If I’m publishing anything online, it goes to my blog. If I’m using email for non-work purposes, it’s self-hosted. Twitter is kind of like glue. It’s not self-hosted, but it’s also not essential. It’s an interstitial layer that may change. Facebook is mostly ignored, except for occasional peeks to see what non-blog non-twitter people are doing (but most of them I see in real life enough to make Facebook a bit redundant…)