Is it just up-front cost? I understand that for larger instances because they'd have to setup heftier systems, but even micro-instances seem to rent cloud compute when they could probably get by with port-forwarding to an old laptop.

Edit: I understand that self-hosting is a skill that takes years to learn, and I'm aware that the vast majority of people on Earth choose to spend their time and energy investing into completely different topics. However, Lemmy tends to attract the techy type, so I suppose I just assumed the ratio of self-hosters-to-not would be higher. I'm not saying it's trivial, just that I presume more Lemmings know how to do it than, say, Redditors (taking total users into account ofc)

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[–] girlnamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 2 points 4 days ago

A lot of people here are saying that it’s difficult and takes a lot of time and money to get started. It doesn’t. I learned how in just a few days, and I’ve been hosting everything on this shitty computer from 20 years ago that I got for free.

Seriously, it took me just a few days to go from absolutely zero knowledge about self hosting to get about 80% of what I know now, the other 20 is just neat tips and tricks I’ve learned in the past year and a half that have made the experience smoother.

Now, I host almost every service I use, the only exceptions being YouTube and steam, and other general forums for when I look things up.