Skip to main content


Here's a thought: self-hosting all technology, a common end goal of many software freedom enthusiasts, has nothing to do with freedom. Rather, it's the logical end of hyper-individualism applied to source code.

reshared this

in reply to e. hashman

Humans have lived and thrived in communities since time immemorial. We specialize because it allows us to scale; no one person can master everything that allows us to have a happy, healthy life.

You may be able to self host a few pieces of software meaningful to you, but hosting your entire digital life by yourself? Well, we already recognize that we can't write all the code, or build all the hardware ourselves---that's why open source is important. So then why the fixation on trying to run everything ourselves?

When software was far simpler in decades past, that might have been a feasible goal! But it hasn't been for years.

FLOX Advocate reshared this.

in reply to e. hashman

@e. hashman
Maybe you can check out https://trade-free.org, and some of the online services provided by the @TROM project at https://trom.tf

And I agree that self hosting everything is not practical for the majority of people as it requires a lot of skill & knowledge. However there are also some easy peer to peer solutions like @briar messenger that anyone can run without much technical knowledge. Bittorrent is another decentralized technology where everyone is relying on everyone else for sharing files, this shows that p2p doesn't always mean "hyper-individualism", it can also be about collective sharing.

Rokosun reshared this.

Unknown parent

e. hashman
As an upstream maintainer of Kubernetes and a longtime user of Ansible, these tools aren't even in the same ballpark for usability (Ansible is MUCH friendlier), but I think that's beside the point.

Ultimately, cloud is what we got when we asked for better hosting to be built. And it is better! But it's a trade-off, and I don't think there's ever going to be a world where we can pick all of security, usability, autonomy, and low cost.
Unknown parent

e. hashman
This is nonsensical to me. Are doctors the medical intelligensia? Are farmers the food intelligensia? Humans necessarily specialize in order to improve collectively.

No one is going to be able to perform surgery, host their entire technology stack, grow and preserve food for themselves, write songs, etc. etc. Universal respect for essential areas of expertise is not the creation of class hierarchy.
Unknown parent

e. hashman
Unknown parent

e. hashman
where can I get a dedicated physical server for under $5/mo?
Unknown parent

e. hashman
No, it's not that I misunderstand. This is a use case you are dismissing and I'm trying to explain why and to whom it matters. It seems it doesn't matter to you, but this is important for tech newcomers
Unknown parent

*
Plus they reinvent many established concepts in incompatible ways such as, uh, files?
in reply to e. hashman

Let's take an example: email hosting.

As @mhoye mentions, initially email was scarce. Geography, long distance expenses, etc. I could eventually host it myself, and did for decades.

Then my time got to be scarce, and so now I pay mailbox.org a few EUR/mo to host it for me. I still have my domain, but they do the annoying parts.

I'm OK with this. I still have agency; I could host it myself again tomorrow if I want. I have the freedom to outsource the annoying bits if I want.
in reply to John Goerzen

Put differently: technologies will always be prone to centralization in the absence of paths to mutualism. If we can’t share spam reports then eventually email is only usable if you’re on a large centralized service.
in reply to mhoye

Thought-provoking. I'm reflecting over computing history: the early centralized computing, then the PC revolution. We had all sorts of different PC vendors, then things centralized around DOS. BBSs arrived, vastly decentralized. #FidoNet, with a central management, albeit loose; maybe more mutualism. AOL, CompuServe, etc. started to be supreme, then displaced by Internet. Then growing centralization there. Is it periodic, with highs and lows of centralization?
in reply to John Goerzen

Did Facebook happen because we lacked paths to mutualism? I'm not sure; we had blogs and RSS, but not the more fine-grained control over just who got to see photos and such. Your point makes sense there.

DOS? There was a proliferation of PC OSs in the early 80s; everything from CP/M to OS/9. BBSs were a thing too. Maybe sometimes centralization happens because a wealthy company uses tricks to quash the indies? (MS did that to Netscape; world centralied on IE for a time)
in reply to John Goerzen

Playing out your thought a bit, what does this mean for the #Fediverse? It seems already people's experience is highly dependent on their instance admins; mine is great and my experience is fantastic. Do we need more tools to share ban lists, etc. between instances and individuals? On #Scuttlebutt (#SSB) it's all on the individual since it is fully decentralized (instanceless) and that is a fairly negative experience IMHO. OTOH, so is twitter, so 🤷
in reply to John Goerzen

I've written about more about it here, particularly around Mozilla's switch from IRC to Matrix. https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2020/03/06/brace-for-impact/

Distilled right down to its essence: federation is anchored in mutualism, and mutualism needs verbs. Any system that lets you share only nouns, only object-tokens, is inherently prone to centralization. Systems that let communities share _actions_ among like minded people, groups, organizations - will thrive in federation.
Unknown parent

e. hashman
Since this thread is doing the rounds again, I wanted to add a bit more detail to the "cost of labour" issue. The investments FOSS projects see compared to venture capital backed projects are mere crumbs. I gave an example here, comparing Twitter itself, the Block Party app for Twitter, and Mastodon: https://kith.kitchen/@ehashman/109396726220858543

Large-scale software projects cost hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars to build and operate. Even "small" but polished apps require massive investment of time and labour. It is neither sustainable nor realistic to burn out a handful of volunteer, part-time, or underemployed developers on building FOSS technologies.

If we value this, as a society, we need to dedicate real resources to the problem, not people's (non-existent) spare time.
in reply to e. hashman

Can't agree more. They are conclusions I've come to myself, having been community manager in various settings and passionate FOSS and fedi advocate.

For instance I have highlighted at numerous occassion that the biggest threats to fedi aren't technical in nature. The huge weakness of #FOSS is that it works at project level, and NOT anywhere beyond that! Not on the level of coordinated ecosystems and technology substrates.

Right at these levels strength is needed for sustainability.
#foss
in reply to smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

Btw, I took notes on fedi's challenges here: https://discuss.coding.social/t/major-challenges-for-the-fediverse/67

In Social Coding Movement the objective is to focus on all those aspects that go beyond cranking out code. To consider the entire Free Software Development Lifecycle (#FSDL) and how it can be supported ideally by federated technology.
#FSDL
in reply to smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

I should also mention another thing that bothers me. The @EU_Commission is doing fabulous work on stimulating R&D to improve our internet and the web with institutions like @EC_NGI and @EC_OSPO and #HorizonEurope program. #NLnet @NGIZero has helped fedi evolve tremendously.

Yet all subsidies focus on individual projects, which are fragmented wrt other projects.

We all know technology adoption happens when ecosystems are established, communities formed and starting to collaborate.

Liaizon Wakest reshared this.

in reply to smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

Glad to hear this. When I was on the OSI board in 2019, I came out to Berlin for a board meeting and was able to meet some of the FSFE folks who were pushing for this sort of thing, but I haven't followed closely since 😀
in reply to e. hashman

@fsfe are doing the right kinds of advocacy there. I'm sort of hopeful for the future with many more social impact organizations entering the fediverse, such as @waag

At the EU / EC it would be very valuable to emphasize more that an "Internet for Humans" requires empowered #People most of all that can help build it. And that doesn't come naturally with only volunteers, while corporations are snooping around to build an "Internet for Money".
in reply to smallcircles (Humanity Now 🕊)

You may be interested in the NGI pilots with large budget (>1M€) and bringing together technologies incubated in NGI (e.g. Fediverse-related) and users / verticals cases (minimum 3).
See https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/horizon/wp-call/2023-2024/wp-7-digital-industry-and-space_horizon-2023-2024_en.pdf page 382
in reply to Next Generation Internet

Thank you for providing this reference! I'll look at this with interest.

As community facilitator of Humane Tech Community and SocialHub, both grassroots communities with broad scope, having done EC DAPSI funded research for https://solidground.work I have found a number of interesting insights wrt organizing collaboratively and taking dynamics and culture of grassroots movements into account for adoption of tech innovations.

My focus is on "social coding" supported by the fediverse.
in reply to e. hashman

Another example: Project Mushroom is trying to kickstart improvements to Mastodon and a fully paid support team and help desk. They estimate costs at 200k for ~2 months of expenses. They're in a lower cost labour market in Canada. https://newsletters.projectmushroom.xyz/real-talk-and-some-great-news/ And their kickstarter is only about 50% funded coming up on the final week.

Even if they were paying two senior full-time devs below market wages, 200k doesn't even cover a year of work. They're not even federated yet and are hitting scaling problems and frequent server errors.

Running services of this complexity and scale have high costs. Running them *well* is even more costly.