I’m a big believer in self-hosting stuff that’s important to you and avoiding big platforms that only want you there so they can extract value from your labor, but I feel like there needs to be some reckoning with the fact that self-hosting your stuff is nearly always a pain in the ass, and often expensive to boot.
That’s fine—and not the end of the world—but it limits the number of people that are able to do it. I don’t know that there is really even a solution to this problem; I would like to say that the answer lies in a heterogeneous ecosystem of small, interoperable platforms, but even that tends to be a pain in the ass.
Even when it does work and is relatively easy to use, you still get people shouting “But what about discoverability?” and “What is their business model?”