this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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Selfhosted

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Your help needed: PhD research on why people choose to self-host (survey.lpt.feri.um.si)
submitted 5 days ago by SelfhostedResearch@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hi everyone,

I’m a PhD student in Computer Science researching why people choose to self-host software—what motivates you, what concerns you, and what factors affect your decision-making.

To better understand this, I’ve prepared a short anonymous survey (~10 minutes). Your insights as part of the self-hosting community would be incredibly valuable for this research.

🔗 Survey link: https://survey.lpt.feri.um.si/376953?newtest=Y&lang=en&s=ls

This study is part of my doctoral research at the University of Maribor, Slovenia, conducted under the supervision of Assist. Prof. Lili Nemec Zlatolas, PhD. All responses are anonymous and used strictly for academic purposes.

If you’ve ever self-hosted anything—or even just considered it—I’d really appreciate your input.

Thanks a lot for your time, and feel free to ask me anything about the project (luka.hrgarek@um.si)!

Cheers!

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[–] grue@lemmy.world 20 points 4 days ago (3 children)

One existing study that surveyed the general population found that about 8.4% of respondents were self-hosting users

Wow! That's a lot higher than I would've expected. My guess would've been about 1%, or maybe even an order of magnitude or so less than that.

[–] SelfhostedResearch@lemmy.world 18 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Yeah, it surprised me too! If you want to read more about it, check out the paper titled "Towards Privacy and Security in Private Clouds: A Representative Survey on the Prevalence of Private Hosting and Administrator Characteristics" by Gröber et al. (2024).

[–] kernelle@0d.gs 5 points 4 days ago

Thanks for the source, super interesting read! I would've guessed 1-5% as well.

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 3 points 4 days ago

Thanks for linking that. Reading the paper, it looks like the majority of the "self-host" population they're capturing is people who have a WordPress site. By my reading, the wording of the paper would disqualify a wordpress.com-hosted site as "self-hosted". But I'd be very suspicious of their methodology and would expect that quite a few people who use WP-hosted reported as self-hosted because the language is pretty confusing.

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

My guess is that it also included things like the 12 year old hosting a Minecraft server for their friends. Which, to be clear, is a totally valid self-hosting use case.

[–] nickhammes@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago

I suspect there's a tendency of experts in something to think of people who do it narrowly as people doing at least as much as they are.

The people who have a bunch of docker services, or complex multi-machine infrastructure are self-hosted software users, and probably in that 1-2% range. People who heard piholes are useful, so they bought a pi 3 and set it up are self-hosted software users. Somebody using an old desktop they got on Facebook marketplace for running Plex media are self-hosted software users.. and so on. So are the people in their houses, some of their friends and family.

Using that inclusive definition, being closer to 10% than 1% makes sense to me.