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?


dealt with tis with my husband. He doesnt use any of the stuff i put together. I had a talk with him and he admitted that he was happy i was playing around, but none of the things i was “fixing” were broken in his eyes. For eample i put together mealie for recipes and to him that wasnt any different than the recipe books he normally uses, or his head.
What he did want though, was a way to share his commissions with his clients. But he hated nextcloud because he was always having syncing issues. So ater talking with him i set up a samba share to my server that he could drag his commissions to. That golder rclones to nextcloud. Its not what i want, but he doesnt have syncing problems and hes more than happy with it.
I set up immich and he never used it. He just preferred manually browsing the photo directory. So i use immich and he manually looks at things.
We eventually came to an agreement, i work on the stuff i want to work on, and if it would affect him he and i talk about what would work for him, and i work around that requirement. It makes the project into a fun problem to solve and he actually uses the thing in the end.
No amount of “but this is better” would shake him because it doesnt feel natural to him
It was nice to read how you met your husband where he was at in regard to getting him to use these things. You two sound like a good match :3