I find the idea of self-hosting to be really appealing, but at the same time I find it to be incredibly scary. This is not because I lack the technical expertise, but because I have gotten the impression that everyone on the Internet would immediately try to hack into it to make it join their bot net. As a result, I would have to be constantly vigilant against this, yet one of the numerous assailants would only have to succeed once. Dealing with this constant threat seems like it would be frightening enough as a full-time job, but this would only be a hobby project for me.
How do the self-hosters on Lemmy avoid becoming one with the botnet?
I read the other day about a protocol called Gemini.
https://geminiprotocol.net/
It might fit what you are looking for, if you goal is just to publish interesting content, or get the experience learning something new and different, but not for you if you want to monetize.
It is an alternate to the internet. You can self host there, also, but they have built Gemini to be unable to support applications, bots, malware etc… it goes much deeper, if you are curious, you should read, I am fascinated.