To be honest with you, I have become enchanted by the idea of self-hosting. You can host anything you want, be it a streaming media server or a website. I am too worried about security to host my own website, but everything that runs inside an isolated network is fair game. You can access it whenever you like, add things, change descriptions, sort, and much more without paying a fee. I absolutely detest modern algorithms driving engagement and interest, and find that when I break away from companies who want my money, I am overall more happy.
Is it... Legal?
There are many ways to legally self-host media. I am of the mindset that once a movie is made, most people who are going to make money have already made it. I do not give a hoot if a production company makes money, or if a marketing company makes money. The artists who made that media have already received their (usually too small) stipend for their work, the rights to their work, and so on. You will never make me pity a corporation. Most of my media is purchased secondhand, but I have given enough money in subscriptions and rentals that I do not feel saving money on digital entertainment when food is unaffordable. If purchasing isn't owning, than pirating isn't stealing.
Video Server
At the moment, I am using Plex for a multimedia server to self-host my movies, TV shows, and music. Most of my digital collection is ripped from my private collection, gathered through thrifting and gifting, and is completely legal. Some of it I have gathered over years from friends.
Book, Comic and Manga Server
I use Kavita to store my offline scanned copies of books, comics and manga. When I purchase an ebook, I download it and add it to the collection. When I find good physical media, I scan it to add to my collection as well. To me, it gives me great joy to avoid mega corporations and their localized, paid databases.
LLM & Image Gen
I also host my own coding, roleplay and imagegen LLMs on my machine. Whenever I want to work on my SillyTavern stories, I fire up my self-hosted LLM and let it go. Same for when I need coding assistance, everything is run privately through my own coding models, on my laptop. To me, I don't believe that LLM and Image Gen is the end times, I think that humans need to realize that all tools have their limits and not everything needs to be taken to the capitalistic extreme. Being able to run a small LLM of 8,000 tokens on my machine for free is a godsend as a small indie developer, and for less than the cost to power a test run of my game build. I love that no one has access to my data, either, and all the LLMs are unfiltered/uncensored so if a corporation has deemed it forbidden, I can still draft stories and scripts about it.