I agree with you that it's about tradeoffs.

The cost ($$$, opportunity cost, and mental toll) of maintenance is very real. It can be hugely advantageous to outsource that effort to a professional, PROVIDED the professional is trustworthy and competent. To ensure that most professionals are trustworthy and competent two things need to be present:

1. A very high degree of transparency, so that it's very difficult for a service provider to act contrary to their user's interests without the user knowing about it.

2. Very low switching costs, so that if the service provider ever does act against their users' interests, they will be likely to lose their users.

As long as our laws encourage providers to operate in black-box fashion, and to engineer artificially high switching costs into their products, I believe there will continue to be a case for self-hosting among a minority of the population. And because they are a minority, they will be forced to also make use of centralized services in order to connect to the people who are held hostage by those high switching costs.

Somewhere in the multiverse, there's a world in which interoperability and accountability have been enshrined as bedrock principles and enforced since the beginning of the internet. It would be very interesting to compare that world with the one we inhabit.

I do wonder if self-host or centralised are the only options.

Something like IPFS, but that works remains my dream - decentralised, but in the cloud nonetheless.

It depends a lot on how accessible those services are. I tried to host some git repos 5 years ago and it was a hassle (needed mostly private git and reviews nothing fancy). I tried again this year and using forgejo was extremely easy. I don't remember exactly what problems I had before, so maybe I got better at finding things, but this time felt more polished. Containers, reasonable defaults, good tutorial on how to start, took in total less than one hour. I did in the meantime an upgrade and that was really 5 minutes (check change-log, apply it and go)

Of course, lots of work was done in the background to reach this point, but I think it is possible. Will I make the effort to make that happen for a social network? No, because I am not using them that much.

Technically things become simpler (in the sense that you can do it "at home" and if you add LLM-s to answer you when you don't know some obscure option it is even easier), but identifying well the use-case, deciding defaults, writing documentation, juggling trade-offs will remain as hard as before.

Note/edit: something being possible does not mean one should do it, so I think it will depend on everybody's priorities and skills. I wish though good luck to anybody trying...

>And consider we're not on decentralized USENET nodes discussing this. Instead, we're here on centralized HN. It's more convenient. Same reason technical folks shut down their self-hosted PHP forum software and migrate to centralised Discord.

You're contradicting yourself. Why is HN centralized, while a phpBB forum is decentralized? Are you conflating decentralization and being open source?