[safety1st]

> We need more self-hosted platforms for personal publishing that aren’t Wordpress.

Do we really? Of course it's OK to have lots of platforms out there (and the author mentions several), but do we need them for the indie web to grow?

The word need is used so many times in this article, but frankly signing up at Wordpress.com or WP Engine is about as easy as it gets and within minutes you have your own site, access to a huge community and the functionality of thousands of plugins, forever guaranteed that if the host becomes a dick you can just export everything and switch to someone else, etc. The author is talking about having stuff that's easy to install but you don't have to install anything. Self-install and self-host are frankly a non-starter if you want easy, that's not just a technical/UX problem, it's support/maintenance/etc that takes raw hours. WP has been so successful precisely because it's easy for a total novice to get up and running, and there are dozens of hosts who do the plumbing work for you. I'd argue this is a model for something like Mastodon to aspire to.