"Fully-owned" when it's relying on GitHub Pages, Hugo, Obsidian and Cloudflare to function.

Two of which are services operated by a corporate entity and one of which is a closed source piece of software.

The only thing "owned" here is the fact that the entire blog is simple markdown and the domain name. However, that doesn't mean it's very portable. It's not impossible, but it's a lot more work than I would want to do.

Obsidian is just a very convenient markdown editor. You could rip and replace it with another editor trivially. You just don't get the convenient UI

It's deployed onto Cloudflare Pages - I think this is 100% the opposite of fully-owned.

As long as they use their own domain and have that registered with some other registrar they can trivially move the blog to any other hoster, including a random VPS. So while the current setup depends on github and cloudflare they don't hold much power over him.

It's not really fully-owned, but it's owned in the ways that matter most

I think the point is that it's not someone else's blogging service. If CF or GH die, you can port this to some other platform or your own server without losing anything, compared to e.g. blogger.

Yes. That's exactly what I meant. The content is not locked-down and is fully portable.

I'd argue it is, because it's portable to any other service. As in you own all the content and methods to generate it.

But he doesn’t. If Cf or Gh go down he has to reconfigure the whole mess. Portability != full-ownership.

No matter what host it's on, even if you run it at your house, if something goes down you'll need to do the same.

The internet as a whole relies on a huge variety of services all working as they should.

If he hosts from his house, if he loses internet he'll still have to reconfigure the whole mess. We don't own anything.

So we’re agreed, “fully-owned” is not the correct choice of words.

As a corporate senior eng, this does't look like a mess to me - just a few things, easily configurable in the matter of hours. My only concern would be if Cloudflare pages offer truly unlimited bandwidth, but so far the site is live. :-)