The article argues for interoperability through standardized protocols. Freedom is achieved through the possibility to move one's own data to a different host when the current host becomes problematic. Either host can be a commercial service, a friend's computer or your own server. Self-hosting is only one option among several in this model.

If you want to share individual pieces of data like photos then this probably works fine. But once you want to serve connected pieces of data that require storage in a relational database, then this will probably become a lot harder to handle, because you need well-defined procedures to piece together data instead of just returning a self-contained blob.