They also seem to think that continually spending money to do mundane things in a virtual world is not a problem for regular people who actually have to watch their spending.

Self hosted matomo works well for me. Small site, I just want to have a bit of an idea about what is popular and where visitors come from. I’ve had it installed for ages and incremental updates work fine.

I hear that matomo can get resource heavy if your site draws large amounts of visitors. Which makes sense, but it might be something to take into account, and maybe install it on a separate (virtual) machine.

Typora also supports it, it’s a great low-overhead tool overall.

• you save a lot of money. People easily forget how it all adds up.
• you save a lot of space. Cars take up a huge amount of space and are just sitting around 90+% of the time. Imagine what you could do with a garage if you didn’t own a car.
• you save a lot of time. A car needs maintenance, it needs to get cleaned, etc. All of that takes up time.
• less worries. About money, about it getting stolen or damaged, etc.
• you don’t need a driver’s license per se if you don’t own a car.
• you don’t have the sunk cost forcing you to use it. Say you buy a car and then you end up barely using it. You might feel obliged to use the car to go shopping or to go on vacation, because it would be ‘wasted’ otherwise.

I run my own Mastodon instance, but for Lemmy it seemed more logical to join an existing instance that aligned with my interests. I wouldn’t be adverse to abandoning my self-hosted Mastodon for a shared instance, but I would prefer a small instance run by and for people I know, rather than one of the huge ones.