People want products, not projects

There's a third category that's even more important. Any level of DIY tech almost invariably becomes a process rather than a project. A project has a start and end time, or discrete phases, and things that happen between checkpoints don't matter. It's a black box made of time rather than API boundaries or physical walls.

A series of projects is not a process. Process and project are also kind of ways of life, some people fill their lives with projects and some people live continually, always doing something, rarely planning, making every moment count, while a project is all about making everything up to "Deploy" not count.

But when you set up your own server, there's a high chance you'll need to think about it again at some point.

People will accept projects to some extent. If setting up your profile was more like a scrapbook project, people would like it. They liked Myspace.

But I am not interesting in maintaining my own email, one of the most critical bits of infrastructure for modern life, when I could have a team of probably literally thousands making sure it never breaks.