Yeah, that's the crux of the matter. I'm one of the rare (outside the HN bubble at least) tech users who try hard to retain control of data and avoid cloud providers. I've never used Gmail, I have a Google account but almost never sign into it, I don't have a Facebook account, I aggressively block ads, tracking scripts, etc, etc. It seems like the main cost I'm paying for that isn't the setup effort (setting up a mail server for instance is mostly a one-time effort), it's the lack of some really neat features. I don't get Google alerts relevant to items on my calendar, the photos I take with my phone stay there until I manually transfer them to my PC, I don't have an easy way to look up which restaurant I visited in another city 2 years ago, and the list keeps getting bigger.

I really like the idea of having centralization at a personal level, but it seems like the most you can get out of it is fairly hassle-free synchronization of your stuff between devices. Which is nice, but I don't see how it could provide Google-style features that are useful mainly because of the aggregation of many gigabytes of user data per day.