That is the essence, yes :) We’re trying to take a different approach to previous federated social web efforts, and focus on bringing existing UI, conventions and technologies from blogging up to par with their silo equivalents.
I'm working on getting back to hosting my own content now. I had a wordpress blog for years but I got rid of it because I thought it would just be simpler and easier to offload everything to social media sites since that seemed to be where people were. But lately I've come to realize those sites have a kind of (I won't say insidious because that's too strong... troubling maybe) way of branding and controlling your identity through the way they control their UX, determining what content you see, how it's clustered, and what you don't see. Plus yeah, there's not much you can do when they decide what you thought was your content is really theirs and they'll do whatever they like with it to make a buck.
Dealing with the administration is hard though. Hosting comments is easy, brain-dead CRUD stuff but then you've got to manage spam control, post rates, SEO and questionable content.
