For what its worth, here's the slightly edited second half which I didn't lose:

This was responding to the room's consensus regarding "inside-out design (architechture first, UI later) / trying to please everyone being a fool's errand":

Maybe, but I isn't the opposite also a fool's errand? do think that the "outside in" design (make the UI first, then decide how the platform should work to support this UI) & attempts to reject complexity may end up lonely. I think the history of small tech has primarily been a history of failure (at least when you look at it in the grand scheme of things globally), not just because of poor UX, but also because of technical fragmentation. Our predecessors burned bright and created many, many wonderful things. But how many of those things are still used today? How many more dead projects do we need?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking

Reminds me of XKCD's "Standards" https://xkcd.com/927/

I think small tech needs coalescence more than anything. There's a reason why most people settled on using GNU+Linux for servers... Now the corporate world is settling on Kubernetes as well, for good reason. Building/deploying/operating software on Kubernetes is easier for them, and it's easier to train/learn/hire for as well. What can **we** settle on? I think small tech needs a Kubernetes of its own, but designed for the small-tech use case & with a much better user experience. Right now we have about 6 or 7 competing projects; nextcloud, syncloud, yunohost, sandstorm.io, Site.js/small-web.org/Basil, etc. None of the parts of any of them are designed to be interoperable or interchangeable. What happens when one of these projects stops being maintained? What if I start using one of them, but then I really want a killer app or feature that's only available on
the other?

I believe that solving this kind of problem does require inside-out design. There are unique challenges and technical constraints associated with shoe-horning as much user ownership as possible into the digital everyday (cloud services, ISP-owned home routers, NATs, smart TVs, shared WiFi, etc) which we inhabit. There may be many different ways to do it, but I would like to believe it's possible to define standards, interfaces, etc which cover all the possible use cases while maintaining interoperability. Technologists have been doing this kind of thing for decades... At least IMO, all the tech that declined to coalesce around interoperable standard is dead or dying.

I also sorta dis-agree with Aral that "popularity / scaling is the way to the dark side", although its probably just semantics.

At some point we will have to scale small-tech. Not just scaling to millions individual user-owners, but also building ways for individuals' sites, data, and processes to grow, to become highly available, withstanding natural disasters, government repression, hell, maybe even the viral "hug of death" effect associated with reaching the front page of an aggregator like reddit or trending all across the future fediverse. Probably p2p, secure-attestation-based "distributed cloudfront" or something similar will have to become involved at this point.

This may not be happening yet, but I'd rather not plan for failure. I don't want to end up completely re-architecting my systems to accommodate a future where we succeed.