Self hosting also implies building (or using) your own self hosted product. That's a significant requirement, particularly if you want social features. I'm goi

Self hosting also implies building (or using) your own self hosted product. That's a significant requirement, particularly if you want social features. I'm going through this dilemma with books. Goodreads lost my account of nine years. I've managed to recover most of the data from a backup and set up my own blog. I'm self hosting! But my blog is very spare and is not backed by a database of books, book covers, etc. Also it has no social features, no easy way to see other people's reviews or find related books or... I could imagine building all those things but that's like building a whole product! I could also imagine some self hosted book product I could just use (analagous to Picasa in the story) but it doesn't happen to exist. Meanwhile there's a pretty great product for books in Goodreads, other than the crippling disaster of losing a user's account. Also some good cloud competitors like The StoryGraph. So maybe I should just use their product and hope my data is safe. PS: I was at Google when Picasa was acquired. My memory is that the plan was always to focus on the hosted version. Maintaining a desktop standalone product was very much not in the Google business model.