Didn't that only start when he was threatened for being kicked off Twitter?
Exactly. No one is gonna kick you off your own platform, or in fediverse terms, your own instance. The most others can do is defed from you, but that's easy enough to get around if you're determined.
The same reason Trump has his own social network.
Own instances give a lot more control. They can be as outrageous as they like, full on Trumpian, even. They can also control what gets said in that space much more effectively, seeing as how they are the mods and admins. And they don't have to worry about Meta or Reddit (I doubt Musk even cares) getting media backlash and removing them from the platform entirely.
Sure, Threads can defed from any controversial instances but it will be trivial to create a mirror that effectively refederates the problem instance.
It's very, very useful.
For one thing, its a ridiculously easy way to get cross-distro support working for whatever it is you're doing, no matter the distro-specific dependency hell you have to crawl through in order to get it set up.
For another, rather related reason, it's an easy way to build for specific distros and distro versions, especially in an automated fashion. Don't have to fuck around with dual booting or VMs, just use a Docker command to fire up the needed image and do what you gotta do.
Cleanup is also ridiculously easy too. Complete uninstallation of a service running in Docker simply involves removal of the image and any containers attached to it.
A couple of security rules you should bear in mind:
If it's just personal files and backups, there's absolutely nothing wrong with what you're doing.
If you had, say, active system config files there, it would make things... complicated to say the least.
The internet. It's a fucked up place. Nothing like what the big players on the internet would have you believe.
So long as there exists a way for people to not get prosecuted, these things will exist.
Google drive isn’t self-hosted though,
Doesn't matter to most people, and for those it does matter to, there's OwnCloud and a ton of other options
and they charge for any significant amount of storage.
Storage costs money, dude, and GDrive don't cost much.
I’m running Ubuntu server, so there is no desktop to access via rdp, and I don’t have to open an ssh port to access this.
If you are worried about opening SSH to the internet, you should be absolutely fucking terrified of opening a browser based admin portal to the net. SSH is fucking bulletproof compared to any web admin console you can think of.
Why are these not more popular?
Because the use cases for these are very niche.
Those who simply want access to their files will find Google drive much easier.
Those who need advanced access will use RDP or SSH instead
He also did work for Lethal League Blaze. Sounds very much like his JSR output
They're saying physical games have wear and tear and are subject to people not knowing how to care for stuff. You don't have any of that for digital purchases.
It’s built on Linux.
So what? Orbis (the PlayStation OS) is built on FreeBSD, but there's still anti piracy on the PS5.
So no, there’s nothing they could have done to lock it down to prevent piracy.
They could have:
Believe me, if they wanted to try, they could have.
Kindle jailbreaking isn't strictly required, especially if all you want to do is sideload books. It's more about if you want homebrew, other customisation options or you just wanna get rid of ads without paying.
The airplane mode is because Amazon has a habit of updating the kindle without your permission.
That, and Musk's ego won't allow it.