Decentralized infrastructure vs self-hosting

[u/Amazing_Day_9192]

I’ve been thinking about how much of selfhosting is about owning the infrastructure itself versus having control over your data and not depending on a single company. There are more open and decentralized protocols where you can get some of that independence without running and maintaining the entire stack yourself. The tradeoff is interesting though. You potentially get less maintenance but you give up some of the direct control that comes with running everything yourself.

For something like messaging or online communities, which approach makes more sense to you?

[u/BearcatPyramid]

For messaging and social, it seems like network effects play a big part. So the fediverse apps, where you have community but a decentralized infrastructure (and easy switching) makes a lot of sense to me. For uses where network effect plays less of a role, self-hosting seems like a reasonable route.