Which is fine, but means it isn't a one-stop-shop for indie sites.
The main problem is harassment, spam, maintenance & op cost and DDoS
Those are legit operational issue to deal with but he was speaking more to product pain points, things that will motivate a customer.
Maintenance is not a problem. Most of the supposed maintenance burden of self-hosting a website is FUD from cloud-provider marketing.
Like I spend probably like 60 minutes a month on maintenance, and I operate a dang search engine on my server. Sure I'm not getting five nines, but who cares. (There is additional operational work, but that's orthogonal to how and where its hosted)
Ever tried to host and then years later upgrade an indie wordpress site? It's painful for semi-technical people.
I was suggesting a change in social norms not technical.
There’s no reason I need all the engineering of Facebook to directly share with a few friends and family. And having seen one social site after another fill up with more noise than signal, there’s little value in engineering sorting algorithms that attempt to preserve context rummaging through it all looking for needles in haystacks (ML).
Feynman suggested modeling things literally is an inefficient path to discovery. Physicists achieved their best results dispensing with imagining the world as literal pulleys and levers and weights. We don’t need to literally model how to sort it all, just the right amount to assist others.
Software engineers need to pivot from sorting stupid meme posts and put those brains on truly interesting ideas: https://youtu.be/ZSddchIGNG0
People might not like social media, but the ability to discover content on there and keep track of it is just lightyears ahead of the regular old Web.
Another big problem is the permanence of the content. Hosting your own content today is easy. Ensuring that it is still online 20 years from now is hard. Worse yet, even if you maintain your site, URLs still change over time, links break. An IndieWeb build will regular Web tools is just going to be a lot of 404 and "DNS address could not be found".
We've been there, done that. It doesn't work. There is no point in trying to repeat it without some key innovation.