What is the benefit to the average user of running their own server? Most people (maybe even on HN) just want things to work. We buy connectivity services for our phones and our homes. I certainly don't want to run my own Wireless ISP to connect up my neighbourhood even if it was marginally cheaper (until I account for my time).
We buy storage services (for lots of reasons) from Amazon, Google, <your favorite backup provider>, etc. I don't want to run a large NAS and keep it running and backed up.
We buy messaging services (voice, SMS, email, IM etc). I don't want to run my own Asterisk VOIP PBX, my own OpenBTS node, my own postfix instance, my own IRC server.
I buy power services (electricity and oil). I don't want to run my own oil well, refinery, nuclear power plant etc. I do actually run some solar panels, but the amount of cognitive load that they cost me is very small. It is probably under 3 hours per year of having to fiddle with them.
In short, the cost in terms of time and energy from me makes it far cheaper to outsource all of these services to someone else. This doesn't prevent you from running any/all of these services, but I would suggest that you are in a very small minority.
Having said all of that, if I lived on an island with no services, I might be tempted to run some of them myself.
> What is the benefit to the average user of running their own server?
All the server-side use cases you can't do with a client alone. I think you misunderstood my comment; I'm not saying that running your own email server is easy, nor that it's hard but still worth it; I'm saying that the fact that it's too hard to be worth doing is a statement about the software that exists today, not some sort of immutable feature of the universe.
Anyway, that's the wrong question. The right one is: what new software would we make if everyone had their own server? The answer is, I dunno, but the hardware is good enough to find out; a cheap virtual server costs about as much as a streaming service, and quite a bit less than a mobile plan. It's well within reach for everyone in America to have their own VPS running their own email server. They don't, because Gmail is way easier, but that would cease to be true if we had better software. And, once there were a few server-side apps that were actually good, we'd probably make more (just as the advent of smartphones led to a lot of new use cases that would've been difficult to imagine before they were commonplace).
> not some sort of immutable feature of the universe
Except it is. Running your own server will always be more work than letting someone else do it, so unless there is a strong incentive people will let someone else run their server.
This is basically the Law of Leaky Abstractions. At some point you will have to deal with a problem yourself because no abstraction is perfect.
Why is there a graphical installer for the Minecraft client and not for the Minecraft server? Because of some fancy Law with Capital Letters, or because more work went in to the former than the latter?
The value to the average user is the possibility of self-hosting under unusual circumstances. It's like insurance. In a walled garden, when you get canceled there's nothing you can do. In an open Internet when you get canceled you can self-host. 99% of people will never need it but the option is valuable.
We buy storage services (for lots of reasons) from Amazon, Google, <your favorite backup provider>, etc. I don't want to run a large NAS and keep it running and backed up.
We buy messaging services (voice, SMS, email, IM etc). I don't want to run my own Asterisk VOIP PBX, my own OpenBTS node, my own postfix instance, my own IRC server.
I buy power services (electricity and oil). I don't want to run my own oil well, refinery, nuclear power plant etc. I do actually run some solar panels, but the amount of cognitive load that they cost me is very small. It is probably under 3 hours per year of having to fiddle with them.
In short, the cost in terms of time and energy from me makes it far cheaper to outsource all of these services to someone else. This doesn't prevent you from running any/all of these services, but I would suggest that you are in a very small minority.
Having said all of that, if I lived on an island with no services, I might be tempted to run some of them myself.