RE: https://sciences.social/@annasdtc/117224123424001867
Recommending self-hosting is the tech equivalent of advocating becoming a tradwife.
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@cstross Or more like those companies that refused to get off their own generators when utilities started to produce electricity. Of course for those of you who might have a bone to pick with the AI conglomerates pushing machines down your throat there are a few advantages to running your own regardless of the millions of machines that want you to join the matrix.
https://johnnywunder.info/SmokingOnThePorch/liveTheMusic.html
@cstross There are options in between, on that kind of spectrum. E.g. like hosting companies that give you your own Nextcloud instance for a few bucks a month. That works beautifully. But I realize it’s like knitting your own clothes - I know I could learn how to do it, but prefer to spend my time on other things…
@cstross I have not managed to self-host yet, having maintained busybox and created aboriginal linux, toybox, and mkroot more or less from scratch.
More self-hosting is on the todo list, but "who provides your bandwidth" is still a point of attack for anybody mad at you (and endless money sink), in the US ICE can come seize your servers from your house (legal or not), I need to come up with my own LLM scraper mitigations, I can't physically run fiber into my apartment...
@cstross I don't see similarities. Where do you?
@dereisenhofer You really don't understand how most people use computers (or bread and jam), do you?
@cstross Now I get it. I don't consider people making their bread and marmelade tradwifes, that's where I didn't follow.
Regulating food production would be a great approach to not get poisoned marmelade full of broken glass, I guess. 😅
@cstross Around 2000-2002 I was acquainted with someone who insisted that everyone should self-host email. I was understandably skeptical. He was smart, but had some *very* impractical ideas.
@cstross None of the recommendations that people self-host have felt right to me, and this is the first thing that puts it into words accurately.
It really is like growing your own food. Great if you want to; shouldn't be the only way to survive.
@cstross HAH, guilty. However I do think it's healthy to reduce dependency on others.
Not that I'm ready to cut the cables and automate my home with a cyberdeck or anything.
@cstross funny thing is the recent development in p2p space allow you to be a node but without the technical knowledge. self hosting really should have followed the freedombox model but alas ..
@cstross self hosting is like "my pickup truck doesn't run on any schedule than mine"
@cstross the problem is, what can you rely on in an era of fascist takeover of the infrastructure and enshittification of everything. Minimizing potential harm has a lot of potentially viable answers but nobody actually knows how to find relative safety.
@cstross Very good analogy! Related example: my friend teaches clothes mending workshops in community centers and thinks we all should learn. I agree with repairing rather than disposing of clothes, but I disagree with the self-doing and would rather pay the neighborhood tailor for works that will take me more than five minutes. For self-hosting I have a similar view. I really don't want to take on more time-consuming household chores/obligations. Same for bicycle repairs, same for growing food.
I write books on self-hosting. The overwhelming majority of people shouldn't self-host.
(I do think that sysadmins hosting as mutual aid is viable, so long as the sysadmin understands their limits and doesn't overload themselves.)
@cstross things get bad enough all of y'all are gonna be trad wives and not by choice