Self-hosting has some inherent downsides that will never make it so easy that it completely outclasses the competition by cheap mass-hosters hosting the exact same thing for most people. You or I might enjoy fiddling with technical things or keeping our computers running 24/7 or setting up some workaround CGNAT or DualStack Lite so that computer is even reachable from the outside (or even have a physically stationary computer in the first place, lots of people carry laptops around instead or don’t even have anything but a phone) but most people would much rather pay someone US$1 a month to do all that stuff for them.
My sincere belief is that the difficulty in self hosting is due to the lack of priority, investment and development, due to the perverse incentives of the SaaS model. I don’t think it’s a technical problem that cannot be resolved with sufficient work. There are PoCs that prove that it can be made as simple as desktops and mobile phones.
Self-hosting has some inherent downsides that will never make it so easy that it completely outclasses the competition by cheap mass-hosters hosting the exact same thing for most people. You or I might enjoy fiddling with technical things or keeping our computers running 24/7 or setting up some workaround CGNAT or DualStack Lite so that computer is even reachable from the outside (or even have a physically stationary computer in the first place, lots of people carry laptops around instead or don’t even have anything but a phone) but most people would much rather pay someone US$1 a month to do all that stuff for them.
My sincere belief is that the difficulty in self hosting is due to the lack of priority, investment and development, due to the perverse incentives of the SaaS model. I don’t think it’s a technical problem that cannot be resolved with sufficient work. There are PoCs that prove that it can be made as simple as desktops and mobile phones.