I’ve had back-and-forth moments between using hosted services or hosting them myself. At times I felt zero trust and energy to host my own instances of apps that I’d use, like CloudNext. I’d also lean on local-first solutions that gave me agency over my data, but they often came at an inconvenience cost where most of my time would go into adding that convenience on top of it.

These days I’m swinging the pendulum back to using hosted services. First, because running a company and dealing with my medical situation has left me without the energy to navigate the inconveniences that the self-hosting model presents. Second, because I don’t want to end up in a position where the only tools and services that I trust are those that are open source and/or keep the data locally and follow standards. We live in Europe, which means there’s a framework that forces those companies to give me access to my data, so in hypothetical scenarios where I need my data, I should have access to it. I believe this is the way to go because it’s also a model that’s accessible to many people. Only technical people can afford to self-host a service.

Still, I choose wisely. I lean on Obsidian over Notion, and I don’t care whether they are closed source, but I can trust Notion and I can pay for getting my Vault synced across devices. After many years with my static blog, I’m back at Ghost, which I set up in a few minutes and then used Claude Code to help me migrate all my content through their API. It was a joy to set everything up and choose and pay for a theme from a theme store. In the past I’d style my website myself, but I don’t feel this is the area where I want to invest my energy. I prefer to pay someone for the amazing job they did creating a theme, and pay Ghost for keeping my site up and running and always available. Same with Notion. I trust them. These people are all about empowering publishing, and they deserve every single euro to execute on this vision. Does it cost money? Oh yeah, so what—they deserve it.

I also tried Omarchy recently, which was fun to tinker with, but I don’t feel that I need that level of configurability. There are things that I don’t like about Apple’s ecosystem, and sometimes I wish it were more open, but there are so many things I don’t have to think about that I can focus on the things that matter to me. At least today, that’s not configuring a window tiling system. It’s fun, but not where I want my energy to go. I’m happy with my Zed editor, which now integrates with Claude Code, and that’s all I need, really.

I don’t know if the pendulum will ever swing back—I guess it will—but this is how I feel now. Building a company and dealing with recovery from surgery is very energy-demanding, and being negative and zero-trust against tech companies is really not good for me or for anyone. We need more trust and frameworks that ensure our rights are respected. Although having the framework doesn’t guarantee enforcement, I trust the EU that in serious cases, they’d act, as annoying as it might feel for tech companies.