I've been building a project to preserve family voices, stories, photos, and history, and one question has influenced almost every design decision:

Should something this personal ever require people to trust someone else's servers?

That's what pushed me toward making it open source and fully self-hostable. If someone wants to keep their family's memories on hardware they own, they should be able to.

That said, I know not everyone wants to run a server, so I'm also offering a managed hosted version. The idea isn't to lock anyone into a platform or build another big cloud service—it simply helps fund the project for people who'd rather not manage the infrastructure themselves.

For those of you who self-host, I'm curious:

Would you actually self-host something this personal?

What would make you trust (or distrust) a project like this?

What are some mistakes you've seen developers make when they say they support self-hosting?

I'm genuinely interested in hearing how this community thinks about it before I finish everything up.