I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward.
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@mttaggart This whole thread is amazing, btw.
@stanley Thanks for this! I'll give it a read ASAP.
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I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
@mttaggart and if they don't, they'll enshitify until you can't stand them anymore. I've come to that conclusion and yours over the last couple years.
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> "support network and a set of tools to help individuals and community organisations self host"
we have yet to articulate this with @coopcloud but i do believe we are going in this direction
the solidarity network is crucial to emphasise which goes beyond hollow top-down claims of "reuse" and "community"
unity upon strategic tool use has major benefits which stands in stark contract to the dominant reinvent the wheel tech hype cycles...
@d1 @philcowans @mttaggart @vfrmedia @coopcloud that's good to hear, and we definitely hope it goes well
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@mttaggart I am also one of those running servers for friends (mail, web, Nextcloud, Jitsi Meet, SearXNG etc) and I think about moving this to a private community, so I am not the only one taking care of the infrastructure.
@askaaron @mttaggart This is the way. Find several people already running small personal clouds and club them together so they each can be responsible for a smaller number of services. If you do that, maybe you get reliable machines and enough capacity that you can serve more people.
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@mttaggart A throwback to the 1990's/early 00's when you'd share a box running FreeBSD or Solaris colo-ed where we knew somebody and kick in what amounted to beer money.
@rlonstein @mttaggart Yep. Old-school hosting.
Kinda like tildes these days, when you think about it.
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@jumpingjackrussell Don't try to solve every problem at once.
@mttaggart @jumpingjackrussell Agreed. That's a "this porblem is way too big to solve" idea killer.
Think BBS. Then think BBS net.
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@mttaggart I think it would have to follow the pirate radio model: anchor a ship in international waters, tap into subsea cables, 'adopt' some IP addresses, provide a top-level DNS server, ...
@khleedril @mttaggart Data havens.
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@mttaggart I think email especially, without that level of resiliency, is basically malpractice
@delta_vee @mttaggart That's an idea killer. You have to start small.
Think back to how everything started off in the 1980's.
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@mttaggart @jumpingjackrussell Agreed. That's a "this porblem is way too big to solve" idea killer.
Think BBS. Then think BBS net.
Sounds like life these days… requires apocoloptimism.
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@delta_vee @mttaggart That's an idea killer. You have to start small.
Think back to how everything started off in the 1980's.
@drwho @mttaggart We don't live there anymore, and I haven't run email or DNS (or hell even web services) without some form of HA since 2007
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@drwho @mttaggart We don't live there anymore, and I haven't run email or DNS (or hell even web services) without some form of HA since 2007
@delta_vee @mttaggart That's great. Good on you.
For folks kicking around a possible project to start, that implicitly tells them "Don't bother." That is unhelpful.
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@delta_vee @mttaggart That's great. Good on you.
For folks kicking around a possible project to start, that implicitly tells them "Don't bother." That is unhelpful.
@drwho @mttaggart Mail, storage, and VPN (and DNS) aren't small projects you can just run on a whim, not for other people. There are tons of cheap VPS services out there. There are even some who *aren't* running a vuln-ridden copy of cPanel from 2018. That's not really what we're talking about here, I don't think
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@mttaggart @brahms Craigslist and Facebook marketplace too, depending on where you live (I’m within 2 hours of a major metro that always has somebody selling off-lease micro desktops at rock bottom prices)
@ajn142 @mttaggart @brahms
There's an irony to these replies... -
I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
@mttaggart I'd love to see some sort of cooperative agreement between groups in disparate places, so that information could be mirrored across geography like a real private "cloud".
Does something like that exist?
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@mttaggart I recently came to the same conclusion. I love self-hosting but it's not for everyone.
A friend and I put together this site to gauge interest. Would love any feedback you have.
@stanley @mttaggart This is a great article to read right now. I somehow believe there are a million people right now thinking about self-hosting cuz Reasons.
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Not for nothing but I've written a very well-regarded guide on home labs if you want to get started.
@mttaggart Is the PDF version indexed?
Edit: I also just noticed under prerequisites where it says "The Linux command line (start here)" the link doesn't seem to work properly
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I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
@mttaggart there are so many businesses that make more sense as a coop (or even a network of coops) than as a Silicon Valley style startup. The one I want to try and get going someday is grocery delivery from locally owned stores, owned by a coop of the stores, the delivery drivers, and the team building the ordering infrastructure.
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I'm coming to the conclusion that community-owned and operated small clouds (co-ops) with easy onramps for self-hosting open source services like mail, storage, and VPN are the only way forward. Every corpo service is eventually going to make you ashamed to use it.
@mttaggart Co-ops are such an underrated and underused form of organization.
My energy co-op (well, you know, 0.001% "mine") has consistently been excellent in service and pricing.
I've wanted to start one for hosting, but I never thought it would be popular enough to be feasible. Maybe I was wrong.
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