Two things happened in 2020 that changed everything. The Social Dilemma dropped, and Parler was deplatformed.
The Social Dilemma made the case that Big Tech was manipulating attention, mining data, and shaping behavior at industrial scale. It was mainstream confirmation of what a lot of people already suspected. Then Parler happened. AWS shut it down on political pressure in January 2021. They destroyed the most complete archive of what actually happened on January 6. Evidence gone because the infrastructure wasn't sovereign. If someone else can pull the plug, they own your history.
That was the inflection. I discovered Nextcloud. Open source, self-hosted, federated. Files, calendar, contacts, email, tasks, video calls, project management. The off-ramp from Big Tech SaaS. I've been using it ever since. Learning it. Living with it. Running it.
The hosting company I started in 2008 had been waiting for this. The commodity hosting market was never the right vehicle. Sovereign infrastructure is. Nextcloud is the product. Trust is the thing you sell. Everything else is the delivery mechanism.