Hosting and public are different. This measure is like saying unless you are painting public murals you haven't made real art. The take is just so wrong it's hard to know where to start.
I enjoyed reading it. But the big problem is always going to be how to fund everything from the start without any return while living on a low salary :*(
Looking for an alternative to HN, I decided to spend 6 months writing some code and got my first result, which is how https://comuniq.xyz was born. It's nothing compared to the power of Hacker News, but it could become an alternative. To make it stand out, I added notifications, Markdown text styling, and a layout that the community there says is pretty nice.