It can be. Controlling your own devices enables you to reject planned obsolescence, which produces unnecessary e-waste. It also allows you to avoid having unwanted "generative AI" features, which are responsible for a lot of electricity and hardware consumption.

Thanks. Privacy can be one benefit of controlling your own computing. I also aim to promote subject matter that is more accessible to people with less technical expertise, whereas self-hosting seems to involve quite a bit of technical experience.

I created the comm after realising that a lot of the problems that people are raising (very valid) concerns about in recent times (declining quality of platforms, privacy issues, etc) all stem from a root cause, that being the transfer of computing tasks to centralised platforms.

I'm not sure I understand the need to avoid the Internet connection?

For me, home computing is about:

• Making good use of the hardware one probably already owns. No need to constantly be purchasing the newest whatever. An dot favor easily upgradable/repairable hardware instead of the shiny expensive e-waste... something I know quite well from personal experience: I had been an Apple user since the early 80s up until maybe 6 years ago.
• Not relying on third party services, or as little as possible. And learn to do stuff ourself. Heck, I learned to use ssh to post my blog and image magick to optimize the size of the pictures, I was nearing my 60s... Like I learned to mend clothe, and to solder (I wanted to be able to fix our simplest electronic device) when I was in late 40s ;)

But I do use the Internet. Daily, or almost. I just seer away from the social media (I'm on the fediverse, that's all my online 'social' presence) and all the 'must have' trendy apps and services. Heck if I was not married already, I would not use an app to date. I would do like we used to do up until rather recently: I would go talk to any woman I would have deemed interesting enough.

I even use a cloud (just not GAFAM) ;)