Self refers to oneself as in, a person. I never associate selfhosting with a company which runs their own servers. Technically they do self host but is it a company asking questions on an online forum and referring to itself as oneself? Is a company a person? What is a company even? Philosophical questions we dont have time to discuss.
To me, self hosting means a person is self hosting things. Some have racks and use 1kW of power on idle, some have micro servers. In any case, just one paragraph explaining what you have at the top of a post is sufficient to get the point of what you know across.
Id say a more important distinction is persons who self host software only (VPS) and those who do hardware as well.
Its been a while since I used one but arent 3.5’s unreliable? I still remember having problems with data integrity way back then. I dont remember them as some rock solid tech and I’d rather put my faith into 650MB CDs if I had to choose.