Bix references my post on getting people self-hosting collectively, sketching a rather nice, alternative vision of the indieweb built on the likes of Pika and Bear (I liked diffusion):

It’s better by far to focus on other aspects of the independent and open web: a diffusion of many, smaller service providers; easily having and keeping your own domain; and true data portability.

I was aware of lumping Pika and Bear in with the likes of Substack in my original post, which is obviously unfair. Bear is (I think) a one-man band, albeit with github-hosted code and several contributors, while Pika is run by Good Enough, a small web company building some nice indie services in addition to Pika. These companies are not the enemy, and it would be great if folk were heading to them instead of Medium and Substack. And it’s a good thing if someone is dealing with bot attacks, even if I get the same service from my host.

So why self-host?

Firstly, Pika, Bear etc. might be limiting if you’re, say, a journalist – you may want to add a newsletter, comments, webmentions or whatever – anything beyond your basic set of indie blogging features.

Secondly, I’ve had this thought on my mind recently: If the social media you’re using has a CEO, it’s not decentralized.

Now, this is obviously aimed more at Bluesky than Bear, but I think the principle – however hypothetical, or abstract – is the same. Publishing on any platform managed or owned by someone else will always carry some form of risk, whether that’s of the small company going bust or being bought out by Megacorp Industries, or of the main developer going rogue and making it an agentic AI service, or them simply not having the time to run the project any more.

You could of course argue you run the same risk with your blogging collective, but I would hope the diffusion (it’s a nice word) of responsibility and the lack of a profit motive could make that less likely. Probably naïve.