EncryptKeeper’s explanation is perfectly concise and informative if you have a cursory grasp of self hosting and networking.

If it’s not making sense to you, I would suggest revisiting some of the technical fundamentals of self-hosting, which admittedly is quite an advanced topic that most people don’t, and do not need to care about.

You would be equally well-served, perhaps more so (if you don’t really care about privacy or terms of service) by sticking to regular cloud services. The road to self-hosting is arduous and if done wrongly, causes you more harm than good. Especially if your technical foundation is not yet strong. Which your posts suggest is the case.

Same, I have never pirated any game since the day I installed steam for the first time. It just makes buying games so much easier, and I don’t have to worry about drm or malware at all.

In my case, I rather pay a one-stop reasonable price for content than deal with the hassle of piracy.

What is this I don’t even

This is 100% me but for Lemmy.

Can confirm, I bit the bullet for a CR2004 last year and it took me a couple of weeks at least to set it up the way I wanted. Powerful, but steep with a capital S.