All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia.
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@annasdtc For me, the way forward is not for everyone to self-host his email, etc. It's that the provider of these services need to stop being large companies, but instead of cooperatives whose workers or executive groups comes from circles you share values with. Something like e.g having your email hosted by a sysadmin co-op that hosting services only to residents of a city, for exemple, I don't know ... Same applies to open source software: it gets forked all the time, so you keep using the fork maintained by the university/coop/whatever you trust.
@ered @annasdtc
Indeed. That's what pretty much all economists (since Adam Smith) who are not gung-ho for authoritarianism (either left or right) argue. Government has to regulate to ensure that no company can become too big to fail. Not to stop them from existing, just to stop them from overreaching. And that applies to tech just as much as it does to groceries. And if something is critical enough to be considered a utility then it should not be run by a private body at all. -
@annasdtc On the other hand, the fact that there are only a few big hosting providers leads to the situation we are in. Defending self-hosting is a way to fight against this so that smaller hosting providers can continue to exist. If there are no more people who self-host, the next victims will be the small hosting providers
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All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
@annasdtc Well, it could be instead to collaborate with each other to build something new…
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@annasdtc Perhaps ironically, it also seems like a very stereotypically American worldview.
@datarama indeed!
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@annasdtc I think the people who code and say such things can't imagine what anyone would do other than coding. If they *could* imagine, they moght just stop coding
@Bumblefish that's also part of my suspicion. We all tend to mingle with folks similar to ourselves, and some folks can't just imagine there are other people with different skills and interests than themselves. (This also applies to other social circles.)
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@annasdtc The actual problem is that people need to pay less problematic companies to do it.
I absolutely have the skills to self host e-mail and web, I used to do it professionally and could do it again with some effort. Instead I pay six pounds a month to @beasts for my e-mail and web, and it's only that much because I have a lot of e-mail.
I could have carried on using Google for free for my e-mail, but I'd rather not. The roundcube/exim e-mail of Beasts is also less friendly than Gmail, but in the end it does the job.
I also have zero interest in setting up community hosting for a load of people. Pay me.
Communties could get together and pay Beasts (or others) money, it'll cost less in aggregate than individual customers paying per month.
If people can't commit to paying slightly more than 2 GBP a month, they are part of the problem.
@syllopsium @beasts Very much. As part of my household's de-Googling we're paying for stuff like cloud space, calendar, email, etc. Everyone pays for physical products and services, and digital stuff should not be different.
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All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
It isn't just about skill.
Many of us with the skills don't want to do this in their spare time.
Most people don't have the time to.
And many do not have the dosh to pay for hosting.
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All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
@annasdtc personally self-hosting vs big services is similar to gardening and farming as in: gardening is a great hobby and allows one to learn a lot about plants and soil (and can be a nice addition to gain personal independence!), but one would be mistaken to assume everybeing wants/can get into gardening (and even more mistaken to decry anybeing not willing to switch to gardening as bad!)
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All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
@annasdtc I know this was mentioned a few times in the thread already, but we need something like tech credit unions. Where the customers are also shareholders.
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It isn't just about skill.
Many of us with the skills don't want to do this in their spare time.
Most people don't have the time to.
And many do not have the dosh to pay for hosting.
@rrwo Indeed! And this is only one of the million self-sufficiency skills one could have. Surely most of us (able-bodied) would be able to grow our own food if needed, or make our own furniture, clothes, crockery, ... but why wouldn't we take advantage of specialization? What I want is that those who do something are paid fairly for their work (which, in turn, involves me paying for the good/service), and that the products/services they offer are good. And use my spare time to do things I enjoy.
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All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
around the year 2000
lunch at workme: It will be so great when my laptop is replaced by a terminal and someone else (I think this was precloud) handles backups and updates
everyone: yes
tee hee, little did we know of the horrors of MS 365 and #enshittification
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All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
@annasdtc one of my big personal worries on self hosting, while i think it's neat and could be fun, is that i use other-hosted stuff in case something happens that i am unable to pay or lose my hardware. i don't currently have the stability to guarantee that and i don't want to risk losing my stuff if something bad happens
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@annasdtc one of my big personal worries on self hosting, while i think it's neat and could be fun, is that i use other-hosted stuff in case something happens that i am unable to pay or lose my hardware. i don't currently have the stability to guarantee that and i don't want to risk losing my stuff if something bad happens
@annasdtc i'm also reminded from other replies of ~15ish years ago when friendgroup had our own server (vps? i forget it's been too long) that we hosted stuff on, mostly game servers, but also teamspeak and such and we paid what we could to help out with the fees for it
that kind of like... friendgroup communal hosting would be nice to see more often
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@annasdtc For me, the way forward is not for everyone to self-host his email, etc. It's that the provider of these services need to stop being large companies, but instead of cooperatives whose workers or executive groups comes from circles you share values with. Something like e.g having your email hosted by a sysadmin co-op that hosting services only to residents of a city, for exemple, I don't know ... Same applies to open source software: it gets forked all the time, so you keep using the fork maintained by the university/coop/whatever you trust.
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All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
@annasdtc
many people have always been (rightly) suspicious of the individualist 'self' framing and look and experiment and practice community, cooperative, or mutual hosting models.
https://vvvvvvaria.org/~decentral1se/notes/watermill-dreams/ -
All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
@annasdtc
self hosting something minimal is fun and all, but big picture, it doesn't help in the slightest.
that's like if an army were attacking you and the proposed solution would be "just carve soldiers out of soap." -
All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
@annasdtc
Even when there is plenty of open source software to self-host everything, this is not generally feasible. It requires a lot of configuration and security knowledge to get it safely up and running.
But there are sufficient non big tech, even non-USA, companies to choose from for all basic services. -
All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
@annasdtc @troublewithwords @redjives
to self-host is closer to telling you to grow your own food from scratch, including foraging for seeds.
you’ll be dead in a month.
as i replied to the thread:
**nothing** is better to self-host if you’re not a veteran developer.
even veteran sysadmins get hacked all the time.
**all** software has vulnerabilities, so relying on professional services is almost always the best bet for almost everybody.
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All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
@annasdtc yeah having to do everything yourself sucks. and that’s coming from someone who picks DIY over other options every time. the thing is, i mostly do that because i like broadening my skillset, because new experiences are fun, all that. the part where i have to (like when the healthcare system sucks and i gotta homebrew HRT) just makes me angry.
but, and you should know this because you’re on the fediverse, it’s not always a black-and-white choice between self-hosting or entrusting tech companies with your data. we can still help each other as a community. things aren’t that dystopian yet, and we should keep working to steer clear of that timeline.
i don’t think incentivizing people to self-host whenever some corp screws up is bad per se, but i think we should go a bit further and also equip those interested with better tools and know-how for doing that in a way that allows them to host for a community without too much risk or effort.
and the sooner we normalize that the better, because sweeping regulations aimed solely at corps have already resulted in collateral damage that makes running such things unfeasible for a lot of people. -
All this self-host techie discourse sounds, to me, a bit like a self-sufficiency dystopia. If we were discussing how bad public transportation is, and someone replied "just transport yourself", most of us would say "that's not it". But when we discuss wanting to get out of large American tech or of nazi-sympathyzing companies, the solution can't be "just host your services yourself". Having to do everything yourself is not my idea of a functioning society.
