Basically yes, you can install the app. Where is the data for that app stored? If on the phone, then your data is lost when your phone dies (maybe even when you switch phones). If in the cloud, that’s great, but then someone else has your data. Selfhosting is to get the convenience of “the cloud” (multi-device/user sync and sharing) without actually relying on the cloud.

Take Jellyfin/Plex/Emby for example. Yes, you can just connect a laptop with and HDMI cable and play from VLC. Or you can just use an USB stick in the TV and play from the file system. But you have 2 TVs, a tablet, and a phone that all want to watch something from your movie collection. Of course you can just plug this stick into other devices, and use it that way. Or subscribe to Netflix that may or may not have the movie you want to watch. But what if you had your own Netflix that can be used by multiple phones, tvs and tablets, even at the same time? What if it even synced the progress of a series so your TV no.2 knows where you left off on phone no. 4? This is what self hosting is made for. You HOST “Netflix” yourSELF.

A password manager because if anything goes wrong, you’ll be completely screwed.

What you SHOULD absolutely self host though is a password manager, so you can be in control of your most sensitive data.

Regarding email, I think everyone should absolutely self host it, but it’s less and less viable in this google/Microsoft duopoly world. But ideally everyone would self host it. The reason why people advise against it really comes down to lack of real competition, and the two tech giants dictating how we violate every RFC possible.

What?

Okay, little bit of DNS basics:

if you run a commercial router at home, that runs a DNS recursor, which by default just queries your ISP DNS server, which queries another one, and so on. It’s DNS recursors all the way down. If you configure your router to use google’s DNS, now you’re just querying from Google instead your ISP.

You can also run a DNS recursor (and/or an authoritative server) separately (e.g Pihole, Bind9, PowerDNS, etc.) inside your network, and nobody else but you will have access to it. As long as you don’t expose the service directly to the wide Internet (so nobody can connect), you’re fine. DNS will work for you, but nobody else.

Also, 192.168.x.x IP addresses are private IP addresses, it’s only routeable inside your network. Nobody outside can access your stuff with those IP addresses.

I don’t know what the question was, but I’m hoping somewhere here you found some information that will help google/bing/duckduckgo around and provide you an answer. There are a lot of sources online for understanding DNS and networking, so you should look into that a bit.

I agree. I trust Bitwarden more to host it than me. I can have too many things going wrong. With that being said, I do agree with the security implications with centralized Bitwarden, but I’d rather have that risk than to screw myself over due to my own incompetence.

Someone a while ago mentioned on this sub: The best thing to host yourself is a password manager, and the worst thing to host yourself is a password manager.

Json with comments is literally perfect. Formattable, machine parsable, minimisable, easy and fairly concise. Honestly I can’t think of anything better. (Comments in json are essential IMO, without it it’s actually not that great, and I’d go with yaml instead)