servers are really no harder to operate, but propaganda has convinced people that they should leave it to the experts, as a means to capture their data and make them dependent. reversing that belief seems hard.
OTOH, keeping data stable (safe against loss) in consumer devices, especially ultraportable ones, is a bit of a challenge. the best answer to that so far has been live backups.
I know a better way to approach this: local apps, encompassing all the logic (no client/server separation), using dumb p2p storage for the data.
https://www.fsfla.org/blogs/lxo/draft/decent-computing