Hosting data yourself wouldn’t be required, but it would become an option.

You’d have the option of leaving your identity on your home server, or a separate domain/website, or host your data and identity but use another instance to federate.

Though, designing UX for this will be an interesting challenge.

Note that tons of instances have increased the limit FAR beyond 500 chars. Mine has 2000.

You can actually put alt-text in images, ![alt-text](URL)

well, not if you want a UI that’s designed around threads like Lemmy or Kbin does 🤔