Then a goal should make the responsibility as minimal as possible (buying a box, inserting a thumb drive and answering a few questions and you're off to the races).
You misunderstand. Responsibility cannot be avoided.
- power's out at your house. You should have bought a UPS.
- internet's out at your house. You should have a router with a backup connection.
- security exploit in the wild. You should have configured automatic updates.
- update repo changed URLs. You need to change the config.
- you enabled open signups, and now strangers are distributing MP3s from your images directory. You need to kill those accounts and change the config.
- you let your cousin have an account, and now he's in a flamewar with half of Australia (which he thinks is Austria, and also he believes is ruled by the Illuminati). You need to shut that down and talk to other admins about getting off of their blocklists...
- Your ISP is [ISPs are, to your 2nd point] actively hostile to running "servers" from your connection, so you must either pay a ridiculous premium for that privilege, or jump through hoops to evade their intentional breakage.
- Your other cousin does something illegal (sells drugs, posts revenge porn, threatens a public official) using your host and now the police are knocking down your door in the middle of the night and dragging you in for questioning. Even if you avoid charges, your neighbors eye you suspiciously from then on.
self hosting is how much of that are you willing to put up with.
Everything is a possible point of failure. Of those there are those you can control and those you can not. Just adding in a DNS resolver ups the number of possible points of failure by 2. Mix in a proxy server with TLS rewriting. Add in a few more. Add in your docker source of containers is gone more failure. That on top of your usual 'computers are broken in weird ways' most of the time.
Outsourcing that to a 3rd party is tempting, very tempting. But you are also sacrificing other things to do so. So you have to balance those two opposing forces. Sometimes picking up the phone and saying to someone on the other end 'fix it' and they fix it is useful. Other times you digging thru hundreds of forums (or chatgpt these days) and figuring out what is wrong is interesting too and has its uses.
That most people just sign up for something and just want it to work. I totally get.
