Facebook, Twitter et al have entire office floors to deal with legal threats.

The UK police love to go after "soft" targets and there's no-one softer than someone who's life can immediately be ruined by arresting them and thus getting them fired due to missing work.

Edit: I now see you mean "host their own personal content" but the point still stands.

Although you do have a point, the freighted language isn't fair.

Big white-collar crime is a different, and much more resource-intensive, set of challenges to investigate and prosecute. As such, it is not a constabulary remit - it needs bodies such as the SFO, which depend on extensive budgets to be effective. Blame the government for not prosecuting the big white-collar fish.

I'm sure it grinds every copper's gears that the bastards get away with it.

Last year some small single dev company got sued and dude lost his house, because he used google fonts, and didn't realise it was against GDPR. This is my worry really. What I want, is a way to tell my website that the user is sitting in these places. I want to be able to know the user is there, so I can geo-fence them off.

For most, I dont think anything will change. Convenience is king.

Doubtful. People either don't care or are too lazy to shift. Also, I think it's safe to assume ISP's are going to be wrapped in on this too.

What do you mean again?

Very few people outside a small clique want or care about self-hosting anything.

Most ISP won't even let you do it anyway. I know the players in Canada don't and I think Australia too. So even if you had the inclination to do it, not going to happen in our current world.

I'm not sure you need ISP approval to self host?

You may be forced to pay a lot more for a static IP address. Running servers on a residential dynamic IP address can go against the ToS/AUP for some ISPs

Can self hosting deliver content at the scale we're used to now?

Yes, because most people have like 30 contacts in their IM roster. Your phone, your home router, maybe even your smart fridge would be able to tackle this scale.

Something like Twitter cannot be as easily replicated, but it's never been about privacy ad encryption.

Another thing that's hard to replicate is a global namespace. Federated namespaces (see email. mastodon. matrix) work acceptably well though.