IndieWeb (no space) people are apparently really attached to the idea that when you "buy" a domain name, you "own" something, even though you absolutely do not. I think it's stupid.
If you stop paying money to the digital landlords, you do not get to keep your URL. Unlike a house, you have no squatters' rights. Domain names are rented. Hosting is rented. You cannot do whatever you want, and you have a contract which can be terminated if you break the rules of the agreement.
If you stop paying, your website goes down. Your URL can be resold. Probably for a higher price, now that you've given it some credibility and guaranteed traffic, making it much more valuable than a random string of letters and numbers! All your broken links are now money for the next guy's ads. You have no say in what the next guy does with ""your"" URL, because it isn't yours.
Changing who you pay rent to does not make you an owner. You are beholden to the terms of service of the companies whose services you're paying for, just like everybody else. Your TLD has TOS. Cloudflare has TOS. Your host has TOS. Every person you are paying money to has terms attached to that transaction.
Of course, this doesn't actually matter; the important thing here is that you have disposable income to spend on your hobby and they - those worthless peasants who use (cue music) SOCIAL MEDIA - do not. The idea of ownership doesn't have to be true in a meaningful sense, because the "ownership" is not actually what matters; what matters is that there is a barrier to entry that keeps out the rabble.
There seems to be a persistent belief that having money than other people - and/or caring to spend your money on THIS hobby instead of THAT hobby - naturally means that your thoughts, opinions, and feelings are superior. Your money makes your blog important, unlike someone's Facebook posts which are inane mindless shallow bullshit.
(After all, what kind of LOSER just posts about their life all the time where their friends and family can see it? They should post about their life all the time where only white 40-something men who work in tech can see it instead! Who cares about your friends, family, and community when there's white guys who use Linux out there you should be impressing?)
There are lots of nice things about having a website that are actually true; there are also lots of bad things about using Facebook that are actually true. I wish people on the small/diy/indie/etc web would stop being classist and myopic and also that "personal preference" (for example: "I do not like using Facebook") did not keep getting spun as universal ("NO ONE likes using Facebook") or moral superiority ("there is nothing worthwhile on Facebook"). It's childish and embarrassing as well as offensive.
It's great to have a hobby. The people around you also have hobbies that are different from yours. Not everybody cares about your hobbyist concerns, and not caring about a hobby is value-neutral.
The internet is not improved by being a snob. No one's mental health, attention span, or media ecosystem is improved by someone else telling them they're stupid. If the goal is to build a better internet, you can't discard the vast majority of people on the internet. You can't shrug off what people actually want from the internet, their preferences and interests and habits, because "they're bad anyway".
But of course that isn't the goal. The goal is a gated community, a suburb, a country club. A secluded space with a high barrier of entry, from which it is easy to exclude people, free from "the rabble" and "the masses" and "the undesirables." The goal is a better internet... for some people, the "good" people.