“Just self-host it” is blinded techie advice that ignores reality, most people don’t want to spend their lives patching servers, managing certificates and worrying about whether they accidentally opened a security hole.

But the alternative doesn’t have to be handing everything to a commercial platform. There is a third path: community self-hosting. And this is actually how much of the #Fediverse has worked for the last decade. A local group, cooperative, union, neighbourhood or affinity group can share the cost, skills and responsibility of running services. Not one person self-hosting for themselves.
People self-hosting together.

That gives us three broad paths:

• Commercial services – convenient, but dependent on the #dotcons.

• Individual self-hosting – independent, but a huge burden for one person.

• Community hosting – shared infrastructure, shared skills, shared responsibility and collective control.

The #Fediverse already demonstrates that the third path can work. Federation means you don’t need one giant platform containing everyone. Many independently operated servers can connect through common protocols and still allow people to communicate across the network.

The is maybe a usefull step back to the geekpath we started this artical on, its maybe a useful way of taking the original “self hosting” path further, from federation to native #P2P. The #OMN path is to build the social infrastructure around the technology: federation, open standards, shared services and communities that can actually manage what they use. But we don’t have to stop at server federation, we can build bridges between federated ActivityPub servers and native P2P applications.

The ActivityPub world can provide the wider public network: actors, feeds, media objects, subscriptions and moderation signals. A #P2P application could then hold some of those objects locally and exchange them directly between trusted peers, using technologies such as local replication, encrypted peer connections, DAT-style distribution or other open P2P protocols.

The important bit is the bridge, not another closed gateway, not another platform. A bridge where an #ActivityPub post can flow into a community’s P2P network, be replicated and worked on locally, and then flow back into the wider federated network as an open media object.

That starts to give us a genuinely distributed architecture – person → community → P2P network → federated server → wider #Fediverse and back again. This could make the network more resilient while keeping the social and moderation structures human-scale.

The goal isn’t to force everyone into being a sysadmin, it’s to make the technology simple enough that communities can own, operate and federate their infrastructure together – while allowing people who need more independence to move further down the P2P path. That’s a much more useful direction for the #openweb.

Community self-hosting is step one, federation makes it scale, #P2P gives us another layer of independence by bridging the two gives us a path beyond the #dotcons.

https://hamishcampbell.com/the-fediverse-is-social-tech-built-by-people-who-dont-understand-the-community/

#OMN #4opens #OGB #P2P #Fediverse #ActivityPub #openweb #DAT