Selfhosting in Community

Post by @dangoodin@infosec.exchange

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I was right but I did see something in the replies I somewhat disagreed with:

Post by @cxiao@infosec.exchange

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I think that NOT making those, “this is how you self-host” guides is the worst option. IMO the real solution is to get technologists so comfortable with self-hosting that they can host for their communities and helping them build the social structures to keep them going.

To get to that level, we need to have technologists care enough to try and are comfortable enough with the technologies and paradigms to do it. They also need to be willing to deal with people asking about uptime or questions of trust which excludes quite a few introverts. Beyond a certain scale, you need to worry about not get sued for hosting content that breaks laws.

This means in the US that if someone from the supported community gets hacked or is secretly hiding CSAM/illegal material it’s a huge problem. Especially if the admin(s) aren’t behind a legal structure like an LLC or nonprofit that an admin could be liable for damages personally. That’s partially why things like the Nivenly foundation exist https://nivenly.org/about/

Even for Mastodon instances, most users do not donate to those running it because they see it as something they can get elsewhere for free. The capital costs of running on our own hardware continues to get worse as storage, RAM, and other computing equipment gets artificially expensive due to the same megacorps we wish to break away from. This is a major reason why most the folks who do self-hosting are either students getting a job or already employed in the industry and have trust issues because they’ve peered into abyss.

If I were to wave a magic wand I would try to popularize “self-hosted reliability clubs” at key community meeting places like local libraries and universities. Libraries and uni’s are underrated because they have meeting rooms, and ability to get textbooks or research papers for reference material. Even better if they can let you use a room or storage facility for the computers. Then I would try to convince local government entities or the library/uni itself to allow you host a mirror of their static websites as a “disaster response” protection and maybe even throw some budget at you to subsidize the costs. Throw in some LoRA nodes and connect with other clubs doing the same thing and you basically have a small local data center or region that can actually host things for their community.

That’s the kind of thing we really need imo but asking anyone but a senior system admin to accomplish the above is hard task and most of them are burned out.

I hope this post was helpful, or at the very least, interesting.