Last winter I moved family photos off Google Photos to Immich on an old Dell Optiplex 7040 in the closet (Proxmox, Immich, Nextcloud, Matrix). Main reason was Google One kept getting more expensive.
Tech part works. Immich is great, Nextcloud is fine.
People part doesn’t. My wife uses it because she has to, but she still brings up January when I almost lost a month of kid photos due to no real backup. My sister is still on Messenger, my mom is on iCloud, so my Matrix server is mostly just me and wife.
I have backup now (USB + B2) and cost is lower than Google One, but time cost is higher and family adoption is low.
For those who self-host for family — how did you actually get them to switch and stick? Did you force it, make it invisible, bribe with something, or just accept that they will stay on Google / Messenger / iCloud?
What worked for you with non-technical family?
Reality is that it’s hard to compete against big tech on convenience, features, and ease.
The only sure way to have people use self-hosted services is to make it cheaper (which is irrelevant if they don’t personally pay the bill) or for those people to believe in it ideologically, in the same way you presumably do. To value data ownership, and privacy.
Selfhosting is a journey that doesn’t happen overnight. Most people don’t care and don’t want to care. But for true adoption, you have to care about it for reasons which are beyond the purely practical.