My first thought was, what does it mean for a program like this to be "hosted" in the first place?
My second thought was, for people who play a lot of ROMs, they're either doing it because they know more about those games than typical online metadata sources do; and/or a big chunk of them are modded or even completely homebrew.
Back when I was a lad, we called that a "web site". And a "computer program" was something that just ran on your local device (which was almost certainly a desktop computer), using its CPU, and directly gave you what you wanted, no network required.
And if it used a GUI at all, it implemented its own GUI directly using the API provided by the OS (or some library built on that; originally quite obnoxiously thin ones, but nowadays you can get some very nice abstractions). It didn't delegate HTML or CSS rendering to a web rendering engine, because those basically didn't even exist outside an actual dedicated web browser. Nor did it express the GUI layout in those terms at any point; it was expressed in terms of widgets again defined by whatever SDK, specifically for the purpose of creating GUIs - not hacks on top of the hypertext model.
You know, much like what had to be done to make the ROMs in the first place (although using SDKs oriented around receiving input from a controller, rather than a mouse and keyboard; and around displaying things like scrolling tile grids rather than movable windows).
(And it turns out it's still completely possible to make things this way, and I still do.)
This is like you telling me the difference between a car and a truck and I telling you that there is no difference, both are automobile. Everything is a computer program, but I bet you can tell the difference between the "computer program" your washing machine uses vs the one your desktop pc/laptop uses
Hosted as in self-hosted, as in run on a server with Docker/Proxmox/Unraid and accessible via a web browser, as opposed to running locally on a single device.
The solution isn't ideal for those who hoard entire romsets, but it's great for those of us who curate their collections down to a more manageable size. That can be anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand games, and the metadata sources are fairly robust at that scale.
I guess the subtext was lost. I was stunned by the idea that anyone would want such a thing to be "accessible via a web browser" at all. Self-hosting is the improvement you implement over letting someone else host it, but hosting it at all was an idea that would never have crossed my mind had it not been brought up. And it creates the impression that such hosting is somehow necessary to use the software.
It's a sort of complexity that seems, to me, completely beyond what the target audience - people who collect ROMs - would be interested in. After all, they're explicitly preserving software that itself works in a far more primitive way, because they have a personal interest in software that works in primitive ways.
That's funny. I come at this from the opposite direction. I like to run stuff on my home server, and I started a ROM collection because of Romm. If you're used to managing a media collection using jellyfin/Plex, adding roms feels pretty natural.
Maybe this project is appealing to a totally different audience than most ROM managers
I assumed it meant that the emulator is written as a ROM that loads itself.
But that's probably not what it means. Kids throw words around meaning all sorts of strange things these days.