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- cross-posted to:
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The future is community-hosted
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I agree with the premise that selfhosting is not something the layman can or want to do, but the assumption that self-hosters only host software that serve themselves is very, very dumb, and clearly comes from the mouth of someone who self-hosts out of hate for corporate services (same, though) and not for the love of selfhosting.
He complains that the software he uses can’t handle multi-users, but that sounds like a skill issue to me. His solution is to make his government give him metered cloud services. What he actually wants is software that allows multi-users. What he wants, by extension, is federated services.
The bulk of users on the fediverse are on large, centrally/cloud hosted instances, but the vast majority of instances are self-hosted, and can talk to the centrally hosted instances, serving usually more than the 1 user who’s hosting the instance in their attic.
The author conflates self-hosting with self-reliance, and I understand why, but it’s wrong. If you’re part of this community, you’re probably not some off-gridder who wants nothing to do with society, self-isolating your way out of the problems we face. If you’re reading this, you already know that we don’t have to live on our own individual and isolated paradise islands to escape Big Tech. Federation is the future, but selfhosting is fundamental to that, and not everything can or should be federated. Selfhosting is also the future.
That’s an interesting point…
I’d like to share some (holiday) photos with my friends & family, so I can put those onto Pixelfed / Friendica / etc… I don’t necesarily want to share all the photos…
And that’s using the cloud.
Job Done. The self-hosting + federated cloud future is here!
Rejoice.
The photo sharing complaint I don’t understand, unless immich doesn’t have the option to provide public or password protected share and upload links, which would be a real shortcoming for such app.
I’ve not looked into it properly yet, but - considering this is still free software - I don’t believe that level of granularity exists.
So, if I wanted to share my holiday photos from last week with 1 friend, and the photos from someone’s party to different friends… nope.
I’d love to help community host stuff, but I’m terrified of someone posting cp to a server I have or getting breached.
Every city should host main public web servicies for its citizens, each one as an instance of a complex system, that’s how anarchy works.
Hi! This is what I’m trying to do with tucson.social. Wish the city would get back to me. I don’t want to own/operate Tucson.social alone perpetually. Lol.
It would allow me to expand to a lot more community services outside of social media, chat, and Meetup platforms.
There’s dozens of us! Dozens!
The authors approach to not owning anything digital was to attempt self hosting. But the authors reaction to the amount of work was that he shouldn’t own the “self-hosting”? He does not even realize that he’s back to not owning anything
He proposes the cloud be owned by communities, so in a way by everyone. That’s not the same everything being owned by private companies.
So is he insinuating that communities should have IT people who keep things running for everyone (like a digital librarian of sorts)?
Because that takes time, effort, and money. Like a lot more than one would spend or need for just themselves/family/maybe a couple of friends.
Also, community-run self-hosting just seems like a bad idea from a privacy and legality standpoint. One pirate getting caught isn’t usually so bad (usually a warning or small fine). But once you start distributing, then you’re going from a kiddie pool of consequences into an ocean of consequences. We’re talking massive fines and/or jail time.
Edit: I should clarify that I’m not talking about services here, but content itself.
The point is that clouds aren’t inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they’ve become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it’s not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.
If you do not have physical access, it is not yours. Trust absolutely no one.
«legally aquired» lol
No, you could never buy books on Amazon, only rent them. Calibre with DeDRM plugin was a poor way to liberate them, given that formatting in libre formats was often worse than the original.
I stopped doing that and ingnored the Kindle ecosystem in general. I tried a Kobe reader with .epub books from diverse sources but I mostly use tablets (LineageOS and GrapheneOS) to consume content these days. The reader apps are not that great there, sadly.
I have bought a few otherwise hard to find books on Amazon. Actual paper books. At least used to be possible.
so did the author spent a bunch of money while excited about sticking it to companies upon discovering a company is not your friend. didn’t enjoy the work of maintaining the services or have any friends to share them with. then dreamed up federated services so someone would do all that continuing maintenance for them? am i the weird one here for only putting effort into services i have other users for or actually enjoy doing?
I didn’t get the vibe that he didn’t enjoy it. More that he figures that a typical person wouldn’t enjoy it. And that I would agree with.
