One of the advantages of using Fandom is that many of its features are "automated" or taken care of by someone else. Examples include free and supposedly-stable hosting and web development. If we're moving to a new independent hosting service, much more work will have to be done on simple maintenance of the site in addition to adding content.
In my opinion, it'll also be harder to ensure the survival of the wiki. Fandom is a for-profit company that is all but guaranteed to rake in a steady revenue stream, which helps to keep its wikis online. For an independent service, hosting will be contingent mostly on ad revenue, which will fluctuate depending on viewer traffic for the wiki. Fewer people reading pages means less money to keep the wiki afloat, and that might mean paying for the wiki out of someone else's pocket.
The biggest deterrent to moving, I believe, is that the wiki is now tied deeply into Fandom's ecosystem. It's easy to move from an independent hosting service to Fandom, but it's much more difficult to go the other direction. In the case of one Fandom wiki and its independent cousin, Fandom refused to delete the old site when the move happened and kept it running instead. The result is now two wikis with their own staff team and pages existing side-by-side, one more outdated and inactive than the other but nonetheless appearing higher in search results. Should we decide to move, there will be two wikis that are operational—one on Fandom and the other on the independent service.
Not only will the redundant sites cause confusion, they'll draw traffic away from each other as viewers choose one over the other (three guesses as to which site readers will gravitate more toward). To make matters worse, Fandom will essentially scrub all traces that a move ever happened or at the very least discourage mentioning the new wiki, keeping the original name of the wiki and removing links to the new site in prominent areas (case in point: this Forum post).
Will an independent site allow greater freedom? Yes. Do I think it's worth it? No.
I personally have little quarrel with the way Fandom displays its branding on all of its sites or how it handles advertisements, though I can certainly see how some might be turned away from it. I do agree that their forced sitewide updates and universal UI/UX choices can be restrictive, but I honestly don't have all that many problems with them.
If our goal is to become the "official" wiki for Mineplex, then yes, it would certainly be much easier to do with an independent wiki. But the idea was already discussed fairly in-depth at Mineplex Wiki:Officialisation two years ago. Common points made against officialization (the wonders of British and American spelling systems) were:
- A change of wiki leadership to Mineplex staff members would likely be necessary.
- There were too many alternate sources of information for Mineplex, such as the subreddit and the FAQ page on the Mineplex website.
- The wiki would have to have a more active community and many more detailed and updated pages. (Keep in mind that daily readership of the wiki has actually declined to about 1k from the 2k of two years ago.)
I won't belabor the argument for or against officialization since that is not the point of this thread, but just a little food for thought.
In summary:
- Maintenence of the new hosting service will take time away from improving the wiki content-wise.
- Revenue to keep the new site active will come mainly (if not only) from ads and the number of people who see them, decreasing the stability of the wiki and increasing the chances of a shutdown.
- The old wiki will remain active once the move to a new hosting service is complete, leading to increased confusion and competition and decreased viewership for both wikis (but mostly for the new one).
- Personal opinion: I can stomach (and at times even welcome) the Fandom branding, advertisements, and updates.
- Officialization probably won't happen, even if we become independent.