To clarify, why is “self-hosted” an important criteria to you?
(This isn’t criticism, but I definitely don’t understand why it’s a criteria in your case yet.)
It's more about the consistency of operating on data local to the user. For example, see this comment referencing how HN paginates threads at 250 comments for performance reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22231055 A local database does not have that issue.
Curiously enough, we should also be able to eliminate the pagination of comments by then as well. Both changes are waiting on some software work that we expect to improve performance significantly. I don't know when this will all be done, but I hope it's this year.