Regarding the feeling of something missing by reading on electronic devices, expressed in a few comments:
Some (not all) answers I was able to find in Maryanne Wolf's book "Reader, Come Home". Main concept there is what she calls deep-reading, a complex back and forth between different brain areas and the hemispheres, that needs time and is replaced by specific forms of skimming on the mentioned devices. In particular, the shift between hemispheres allows for integration into the reader's personal store of knowledge and, more broadly, into their own worldview.
The "wasted" time is essential for memory building and consolidation. Add enforced linear reading without immediate availibility to break the flow by googling/notifications/jumping to whatever, also consider haptics and more. Similar effects can also be found in handwriting vs typing, manual sketching etc.
That is far from proven, 'far' being the keyword here in another understanding.
At _this_ moment, AI is in the state of producing things - if you like with factor 10 or more. But what will come afterwards, when all this mush of code shall create _reliable_ results. This means not man month then, rather man years or decades to fix this billion and maybe trillions lines of opaque probabilistic LOC. You have to take the mean of these two stages, if nothing qualitative happens to the models.
Exactly. I'm German and simulated the constellation some year's ago. Verdict was, if you are inside the EU it won't pay out. The Estonian model is for people trying to participate in the EU market from outside.
Much easier with AI. Went from Webhosting all-in package + NAS to Hetzner Storage Share and a separate Emailprovider (Runbox). After a short time I dumped the Nextcloud instance and moved on to a Hetzner VPS with five docker containers, Caddy, proper authentication and all. Plus a Storage Box. Blogging/Homepage as Cloudflare Pages, fed by Github, domains from CF and porkbun, Tailscale, etc., etc. ad nauseam, NAS still there.
Most of this I didn't for many years because it is not my core competence (in particular the security aspects). Properly fleshed-out explanations from any decent AI will catapult you to this point in no time. Maintenance? Almost zero.
p.s. Admittedly, it's not a true self-hosting solution, but the approach is similar and ultimately leads to that as well.
There is a sweet spot between Gmail and self-hosting. I use Runbox and generally separate contexts, with CF being an exception as I use CF pages for static blog websites, some of their core services, AND as a registrar. For the latter, the default setting is porkbun. The reason for this is not CF's mandatory in-house DNS servers, but the simple fact that they do not register .de domains.