Oh don't worry, OP, soon you'll be a cranky old perosn who'll be complaining about whatever social media the young'uns are using and doing your part to "kill" something else by using it
Cause all I want is a platform that isn't shoving ads down your throat; respects privacy; helps you feel connected with peers; and isn't plastered with hate.
I'll be ruining quite a few platforms with those expectations.
Yes you can but for people that are looking to set one up today, not someone that's been running one for 5 years and has basically a whitelisted reputation, it takes a lot to set it up and keep your domain and IP space reputation solid, along with DKIM/SPF/etc records, all the latest stuff like Google's new mandatory unsubscribe header that will keep coming up. Even if a couple people on your hosting provider start spamming, if they're in the same IP space as you, You're going to be getting filtered more heavily for using a "bad neighbor" host. The big corporate/"nonprofit" guys like Spamhaus and Google and Microsoft are basically those controlling corporations for emails, what they say in their spec pretty much goes. They're making it h em oarder for people to set up and run their own email servers, whether that is the outright intended effect for their mandatory changes or not.
Don't get me started on trying to set up a business newsletter account on your new corporate mail server, holy hell, the warm-up itself is pulling hairs. There's a reason companies like MailChimp, Zapier, et al make so much money.