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.
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.
When I participated in approving the Cryptographic Autonomy License, the only FOSS license that provides users guarantees of data portability, I thought that this conversation might start to shift. That we'd recognize that running distributed systems at the scale of what users have come to expect cannot be performed by individuals, and that we needed to shift the conversation towards how we can protect users' digital autonomy and inherent rights without them needing to become systems administrators.
Yet there has been no forward progress. I just can't associate myself with "software freedom" while it cares more about software, a tool, than the rights of people, the only reason the tool exists.
Where are the radical software collectives self-hosting privacy-conscious for activists and the marginalized? Shout out to riseup, but that's nowhere near the experience you might get on a megacorp's service.
The free software that exists isn't up to task. And if we wrote better options, people still can't run it alone. Where's that vision of digital autonomy? How do we get there, given the cost of labour?
> Where are the radical software collectives self-hosting privacy-conscious [apps] for activists and the marginalized?
I hail from one of them, https://cyberia.club. Or at least I think that's what we aspire to be.
> Where's that vision of digital autonomy? How do we get there, given the cost of labour?
I have written my own thoughts about that on my blog (Archive.org link because im away from home and server is currently 🤮ing) :
TL;DR is try to do for IaaS (infrastructure as a service, things like AWS & Cloudflare) what Fediverse/Matrix did for social media SaaS. The 1 sysadmin per 100 users model.
It can't just be 1 admin, 1 computer per "instance", needs to be at least 2 of both IMO.
How to get there? Design for it. Also, treat sysadmins like users, not highly trained professionals, and perform usability tests with them. Build high-usability, high-accessibility interfaces around digital autonomy.
How to fund this effort? IDK ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ my plan was to bank on the idea that "it only takes one".
Software has zero marginal cost, it can be copied infinitely for essentially free. So as long as the software itself is able to do "the job" or at least help in some way, a small number of pro bono workers can make a big impact.
