Netizens are always telling me that self-hosting is too difficult for the average person, citing security risks and complexity.

Well, security risks and complexity didn't seem to stop everyone from running a web browser!

I believe the difference boils down to investment. It's harder to make a profit from helping folks self-host. "Teach a Man to Fish" and all. So the industry never worked on making self-hosting easy and "normal" in the same way that web browsing was made easy and "normal".

How did they do it for web browsing? A whole heck of a lot of work, mostly around user interface design and usability. The tech giants of today, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon all got their start by imagining new, easier to navigate interfaces that everyone could use, not just the tech elite.

I'm not out to "make it big" in the same way that they did, but I **AM** inspired by the change-making disruptive power that they wielded, especially the transformative power of software usability.

Most of the hosting and server software of today is designed by and for technical people, almost exclusively in professional contexts. Their designs either start from the business goals or from the computer hardware.

For contrast, successful designs for user-focused products (client software) unsurprisingly always start with the user & how to interface with the user, everything else is derived from that.

But the boots-on-the-ground digital laborer who is tasked with deploying and maintaining these systems is almost never considered in the design process. They are simply expected to be "professional" and to be able to handle it. Any ease-of-use or convenience they enjoy was probably "snuck in" on the side, while the manager wasn't looking.

I see this tendency towards profit-driven and inhumane/elitist design in the server software arena as the ultimate "root cause" to explain why hosting / application security is hard, as well as why so many security vulnerabilities and server misconfigurations exist in the first place.

It's not easy because no one was ever paid to make it easy. Because if you gave it all away, what would money, power, and software platforms be worth?

Well, spoiler alert, I think it would be worth a hell of a lot, actually. The potential benefit to everyone & to the economy and society would be enormous.

So I start all of my designs from the self-hoster, the individual person maintaining the system. From there, I work towards the "hardware" and the real world, things like the "dorm room LAN" network environment, the Total Cost of Ownership of a server, etc.

Ultimately, I think I'm trying to bring imaginative & disruptive "big-tech" usability to the world of "small-tech" open-source self-hosting platforms and tools.