.me is cooler, but... That all the cool 2-letter TLDs are designated as country codes was an extraordinary mistake that will have unpredictable and devastating consequences long into the future.
Our goal is for .self to be more than just another TLD string, we want to specifically empower the self-hosting use case with local clients that integrate directly with the TLD and operate shared services like mail servers as a public good. We want to dramatically simplify the effort it takes to set up a domain for homelabs and offer free services that are directly tied to the domain like email.
And you needed a gTLD for this task why?