I've been self-hosting for the past 25 years (starting on my uncle's Pentium 1), and I currently self-host basically every service I use, so I'm a bit of an outlier.
But I don't think that self-hosting is really as hard as many think. Or, better, I don't think that the "starter pack" is that hard to achieve.
By "starter pack" I mean something like a nano VPS with a public IP for $5/month. A Docker image for Searxng for a search engine, a PiHole DNS, a WriteFreely blog, perhaps a GoToSocial container, all behind an nginx reverse proxy.
Sure, it has a bit of learning curve, but it's probably feasible by anyone who has used a command line.
For anything more complex, I agree, the idea of "delegated trusted stewards" is probably the most scalable. But if we keep repeating that self-hosting is always hard then most of the people who don't have a "trusted pal" will stay on big tech.
