I see tons of posts about #selfhosting here, and it makes sense. It’s a great option for people who can.
But this excludes the vast majority of regular people who do not have the technical skills to run a data center.
We own it to everyone to make open cloud services that:
- do not put profit first
- do not “own” or “monetize” their users’ data
- resist enshitification by letting users take their data somewhere else
- are as easy and straightforward as the “closed” status quo
@benpate You don't need technical skill to self host, you just need to find a person you trust who does. We don't need everyone self hosting, we need communities self hosting.
We need to regard our networks as essential societal infrastructure, same as transit or water mains, or educational institutions.
Equitable access is no different from a social responsibility to ensure minimally adequate shelter, or labour rights, or healthcare access.
In fact, it's probably a hell of a lot less complex and less expensive than those, it just takes a higher order of organizational will than the typical techno-libertarian sysadmin - wellmeaning as we are!
@benpate who does selfhost a data center? 😂
@benpate I'm all for community hosting by groups of people and/or civil/civic society ngo's to provide the infrastructure.
@BjornW I was very motivated to try and get my neighborhood's >2000 people Facebook group on to an instance hosted by our neighborhood association.
Unfortunately, despite universal "I hate Facebook", no one would commit to moving 😓
@BjornW @benpate This is why we're trying to get https://henhouse.coop going to start small with static site hosting.
