>Chiefly it must be just as easy to self host as it is to make an account and produce content for someone else’s platform. It needs to be just as easy to reach

>Chiefly it must be just as easy to self host as it is to make an account and produce content for someone else’s platform. It needs to be just as easy to reach an audience on your own platform as someone else’s. I don't see how that's possible. Self hosting implies knowing how to set up and administrate a server, dealing with SSL certs and your own domain, paying for your own bandwidth, maintaining your own hardware, and everything else on top of building a website from scratch. It isn't impossible, literal children figured basic html/css/js out back in the 1990s (but mostly on hosted services like Geocities which still took care of all of the backend issues) but doing that will still always be more complex than just publishing to a service. The thing about centralization is, it isn't a trap, it's a convenience. People don't want to be responsible for infrastructure, they just want to put their content online. And centralized services do serve a legitimate need, both in abstracting away a lot of technical issues most people don't care about, and in making it easy to build communities and audiences. The closest possible thing I can imagine would be something like a federated network for webpages - which is such an obvious idea that it obviously already exists and my brain just can't think of where and how - a Geocities for the Fediverse. But even then, self-hosting is a bit of a technical hurdle and most people will just sign up for larger established servers for the sake of convenience.