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Comment by lannisterstark | Hacker News Reader

I skimmed OPs post, and then read yours, and I'm still a bit confused as to how it's different than just hosting a mishmash of different but related services yourself. If you could not, yes that's fine. But if you could, what really are the advantages?

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I argue with computers for my day job, I don’t want to do that after work hours too. I’m happy to pay somebody else (especially Adam who is just so active with the community) a fairly paltry sum to do it for me.

To be entirely fair (in my situation), what I do at work and what I find fun to do with computers are two different things :P

So true. I reached a point where the tools I fiddle with at home have such an overlap with the ones I use at work, with Python and Ansible being the uncanny leaders. I feared – in vain – losing the ability to enjoy hacking as a hobby. They just don't feel the same, y'know?

This is the classic Dropbox criticism, no?

Moreover, the pleasure has nothing to do with self hosting or not, it’s just a pleasant and whimsical UX while being technically solid.

Just because I can manage a service doesn't mean I want to all the time. I'm a busy guy and already have client infrastructure to manage. At a point in my life where I'm trying to cut down on things I have to tend to.

Presumably the mastadon integration. Think twitter with your profile directly tied to your personal site - except not twitter.

I actually don't really use the social stuff all that much. I already have a mastodon account on a country-specific server, and I'm not much of an IRC/Discord user

Hosting all of this stuff on your own would be a lot of fuss which most people wouldn’t want to bother with.

I think you kind of answered your question, no? Setting up web things, especially when they have a chance to get quite bursty hug-of-death traffic, is hard for most people. I'd prefer to set things up myself but I know that places me in a verrrrry small minority of folks.

I suspect that it's simply ease of use. Sure you can use a mish mash of self hosting, online dedicated services, etc, but this looks more simple and cohesive and for $20 a year you don't have to worry about the overhead of all those other things, you just add the content you want and don't worry about the details.

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