The speaker discusses the difficulty and importance of self-hosting open source applications, specifically Mastodon. They introduce Gardens, a self-hosting platform intended for non-coders, which simplifies the deployment and maintenance process for a variety of open source apps. The speaker argues that self-hosting is necessary for software freedom and can give open source a competitive advantage, but acknowledges the complexity and maintenance requirements that make it difficult. Gardens addresses these issues with features like automatic SSL, version history, and scalability options. The speaker encourages developers and sysadmins to contribute to the self-hosting movement and promote the use of open source over SaaS.