Self-hosted VPNs are not used the same way as commercials ones.

They're intended to access your server from outside the house without exposing it to the internet.

Commercial VPNs are intended to hide your identity across the web and to hide your non-HTTPS web traffic from your ISP.

I use self hosted VPN for many years now.

You worry that facebook would associate that static ip with you but the problem is quiet the opposite.

most website will recognize that your IP belong to a hosting company so they often suspect that you are a bot. Wikipedia wont let u edit articls, youtube wont let u comment on videos. Other than that its fine, just expect to pass more captcha.

you could pay little extra and get dynamic IP from your provider. That effectivwly changes your IP. Deleting dynamic IP and recreating it gives u a new one. But I dont do that.

I just hide in the crowed by letting others uss my VPN and rely on service providers often dismissing my IP as bot

To make it absolutely clear:

Your VPS has an ip. All your traffil will go through it if you set it up as a VPN. So your behaviour patterns will be tied to that one IP. You will be the only one on that VPN.

A commercial VPN has many users at the same time on a given Server. So the traffic and behaviour that comes from that servers IP will produce garbage data for analysis.

You could selfhost a VPN on your VPS and let others use it for free somehow to obfuscate your behaviour and patterns, but you as the VPS owner will have to deal with legal stuff then.

If you want anonymity no, if you don't then yes.

If you want anonymity and the advantages of a VPS VPN at the same time you should look for a provider which accept crypto payments, and optionally setup tor, i2p and freenet nodes to obfuscate your traffic.

That way you will be helping the community and at the same time securing yourself.

Tor network could always use more obfuscation.

From a privacy standpoint I don't think it would make a big difference over not using a VPN at all. It will take a bit of time but your new IP will become associated with your identity. From the perspective of Facebook and Google, it will just look like you moved and are living inside a datacenter now.

I route through my server or my home router when using public WiFi and stuff. I don't care too much about the privacy aspect, my real identity is attached to my server and domain anyway. I even have rDNS configured, there's no hiding who the IP belongs to.

That said, server providers are much less likely to analyze your traffic because that'd be a big no-no for a lot of companies using those servers. And of course any given request may actually be from any of Lemmy, Mastodon, IRC bots or Matrix, so pings to weird sites can result entirely from someone posting that link somewhere.

And it does have the advantage that if you try to DDoS that IP you'll be very unsuccessful.

I use a self hosted vpn because my main reason to use a vpn is avoiding monitoring from my isp and whoever is managing the local network, and I don't want websites to know where I'm located.