How did you actually get your family to use your self-hosted stuff?

[dankhramov@lemmy.world]

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?

[hydrashok@sh.itjust.works]

Accept and move on. Those that want to use it will. Others won’t. Cost isn’t everything.

[tiramichu@sh.itjust.works]

• Make it cheaper
• Make it better
• Use your network admin powers to force adoption by blocking everything else. /s

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.

[dragonlover@lemmy.zip]

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

[crazi_man@europe.pub]

You can't. You can't make people like something just because you've discovered that it's amazing.

My wife is a technophobe and makes a point of commenting on any time my selfhosted stuff doesn't work right (even though it's unrelated to my server, like our ISP shitting itself).

I've personally installed and logged into Jellyfin on all of my mother's and wife's devices and neither of them uses it and both go back to Netflix (with ads!).

My parents won't use Signal and dont see the point of installing another app besides WhatsApp.

I've Ihad to install firefox+adblock on my father's laptop and replace the desktop icon with an edge icon to get him to use it.

Even my brothers (who are as tech savvy as me) would not de-Google or start self-hosting after a year of me telling them how awesome it is, until they eventually discovered it for themselves.

You can't make people. Tell them about it, introduce the idea and demo it. That's all you can do.

[makeshift0546@lemmy.today]

Your don't. Most FOSS is missing features and not as easy to use.