Your help needed: PhD research on why people choose to self-host
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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=lsThis 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 ([email protected])!
Cheers!
Done. Many questions which are the same or almost similar.
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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=lsThis 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 ([email protected])!
Cheers!
Shouldn't the control questions / variations of the same be a bit scattered? For me they were all packed together.
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If you're that vulnerable to shady URLs, you may want to rework your blockers or even spin up a VM. If you're that venerable you phishing, just don't give them your numbers.
Why risk it?
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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=lsThis 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 ([email protected])!
Cheers!
Done but I felt lots of questions to be very similar. Maybe there is a form platform that can show only a subset of control questions for every survey.
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Done. Many questions which are the same or almost similar.
Thank you for participating in the survey and for providing your feedback.
We are aware that some of the statements may appear similar or closely related. This is an intentional aspect of the survey design, aimed at capturing different dimensions of the same underlying construct or thematic area. In scientific research, it is a well-established and widely used practice to include multiple, conceptually related items when measuring a specific concept.
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Done but I felt lots of questions to be very similar. Maybe there is a form platform that can show only a subset of control questions for every survey.
Thank you for completing the survey and for your thoughtful feedback. The similarity between some questions is intentional and follows common scientific practice when measuring complex or abstract concepts. Using multiple, slightly varied items that target the same construct increases the reliability and validity of the data by capturing subtle nuances and reducing the influence of random response variation. While your suggestion to show only a subset of such items through adaptive platforms is valid and worth exploring, fixed item sets are generally preferred in research settings to ensure consistent and robust measurement. We appreciate your input and will consider it in future survey design improvements.
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Shouldn't the control questions / variations of the same be a bit scattered? For me they were all packed together.
Thank you for your comment and for completing the survey. It is common practice in research to group together statements that measure the same construct. This arrangement makes it easier for respondents to follow and compare answers on related topics, which contributes to more reliable measurement by helping maintain focus on the subject matter.
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@SelfhostedResearch Done. But I found the survey design redundant and repetitive. Could demotivate people to complete ;(
Thank you for your honest feedback and for completing the survey. We understand that some questions may have felt redundant or repetitive, but this design is intended to ensure the reliability and accuracy of measuring the same concepts from different perspectives.
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This survey doesn't distinguish between levels of cloud service provider, so I was a little confused.
Virtual private servers, cloud virtual servers (like AWS), cloud-based software where you provide code or a program and the cloud system runs it on a server of its choosing, and cloud-based systems where someone else provides the software (like Google Docs).
Thank you for your feedback and for completing the survey. The first part of the survey primarily focuses on Software as a Service (SaaS). We appreciate your input and will consider ways to clarify this in future surveys.
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Good Luck Luka!
I feel like I'm a minority in this group in that I really don't like self hosting but I do it anyways because it gives me the things I want from a content/privacy/control/ownership perspective.
Thanks so much – really appreciate it!
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Hope it helps. There are whole categories of self hosted software I hadn't thought of before. Maybe I should try some of them!
Thank you for completing the survey! Glad it helped you discover new self-hosted software to try!
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Thank you for completing the survey and for your thoughtful feedback. The similarity between some questions is intentional and follows common scientific practice when measuring complex or abstract concepts. Using multiple, slightly varied items that target the same construct increases the reliability and validity of the data by capturing subtle nuances and reducing the influence of random response variation. While your suggestion to show only a subset of such items through adaptive platforms is valid and worth exploring, fixed item sets are generally preferred in research settings to ensure consistent and robust measurement. We appreciate your input and will consider it in future survey design improvements.
To be honest, if 3-4 questions in a row had same-ish wording, I just replied the same thing 3-4 times.
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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=lsThis 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 ([email protected])!
Cheers!
I had a hard time answering these because my opinion on cloud service depends on the cloud. (Google vs nextcloud for instance)
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Why risk it?
Can't limit yourself to twitter, facebook and google. Hell, I think those sites are the riskier ones.
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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=lsThis 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 ([email protected])!
Cheers!
I was kind of surprised by my answers when I stopped to reflect. I realized I:
- don't really like self-hosting
- know a lot about new tech, but am not very excited about it
- don't use a lot of the popular services
Anyway, I hope the results are useful! I don't know if you've done it already, but it would be interesting to compare results from different sources, like Lemmy vs Reddit or wherever you posted it.
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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=lsThis 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 ([email protected])!
Cheers!
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Done.
I feel that it may be helpful to try to capture the motivation for each type of service.
For example. The reasons I host a media server are different than the reasons I host a photo backup solution.
Thank you for doing this research. I dream of the day that self hosting becomes as easy as spinning up a consumer router.
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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=lsThis 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 ([email protected])!
Cheers!
The thing I don't get about these self-host apps is why so many of them exist when the thing they do would be better to implement as a run of the mill offline program.
I just want to auto-import recipes from websites into a cookbook app without any fuss. We do not need to bring a server into this equation!
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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=lsThis 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 ([email protected])!
Cheers!
Done, good luck!
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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=lsThis 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 ([email protected])!
Cheers!
Done. Are you going to be sharing the results here? That would be cool.
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Have you thought about contacting Louis Rossmann? He created an extensive video guide on how to self host using FOSS. Perhaps he'd be willing to highlight your survey to his over 2 million subscribers.
That's a good idea, and maybe even Henry from Techlore.
