[AlgebraFox]

IMO, that is worst of both worlds. You still put your data out there on somebody else's computer but also get to maintain the infrastructure.

Unless you end-to-end encrypt your data, hosting on a VPS is just a marginal improvement over using Google or Apple's regular cloud.

To me self-hosted is having full control over the data. That includes where the data is stored, not just who's maintaining it.