> Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host.

I'm not sure what you are seeing, but what I'm seeing is widespread teach illiteracy in Gen Z outside of their smartphone. Gen Z and younger mostly grew up with smartphones as their primary devices and with little contact with a laptop or desktop computer (and even then confined 99% to browser usage).

> Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host.

I can't quite confirm that. My younger siblings' classmates (still high school students, born >=2010, non tech average people) don't give a shit on these topics and behave identical to the Gen X and Y described.

Looking at my younger sister, I'd risk saying it's the same in all generations. I'll even say more: I think earlier generations had a general thought of "computer consists of separate parts; you can buy them separately and replace if needed / want better performance", even the less technical ones. But now everything is a black box (therefore e.g. why not overspend and always buy a black box from Apple if that's fashionable now).

But maybe that was kind of related to times and the place – where I live people needed to be a bit more savvy, so thought like "why you buy an iPhone if Xiaomi can do the same 4x cheaper; if you chose the right model you may even have a good camera too" was popular even in non-tech circles.

But yeah, now that hardware is a bit more of a commodity and such tradeoff might give you a bit more adware with a bit less convenience, maybe it's different. But the next generation's understanding of computer/phone as something else than a magical black box is gone.

> Only Gen Z and later are starting to care and willing to spend the time and effort to self host.

Yeah, you’ll need a lot of supporting evidence for this claim. From my personal and professional experience, this doesn’t track. And given how online the younger generations are, it tracks even less. I think there might be a bias towards tech bubbles in that statement.

Or, alternatively, I was a lot more willing to put in the time to self host before I had more money and less time. If it's truly important it's not in public. If it's public, I don't have time to keep up with security patches if I'm not being paid.