And you are self-sufficient, or whatever the word is. But that’s the key thing for me, not having to rely on others for my services :)

Dude above you over is under the perception that it requires 100% uptime or other users to to be classified, which is wrong. You are definitely self hosting, albeit only for yourself I assume. Which is fine

Agreed, first path towards that is decentralized identities in my opinion

Federated solutions are just a step in the right direction, to be able to have people access free software and platforms, they will have to do something. Either pay (which they dont) or help provide the platforms.

The first step in helping provide the platform is probably to help host the load, to help host the load, the first thing is to be able to hold your data on your devices, the second is to be able to share your data with other devices.

The first part of being able to hold your data and share it is to own your identity and hold that locally. SSI identities help with this, that means that no server needs to hold and own your identity.

If the identity is kept safe, even though you are the one storing it on your hardware,that means the data you ship, can be trusted through signing.

Once that is the case, it’s just distribution and availability. Which there already are many solutions such as IPFS, or other CDN similar solutions, that means that volunteers can provide as much data storage/distribution as they want from their own hardware.

It all starts with owning your own identity, that enables the other solutions to be trustworthy.

An app?

For a good reason