Forest @forestjohnson@pixie.town

@reese I think the evergreen state college have the geoduck as their mascot ?

Yup: https://www.evergreen.edu/geoduck/speedy-evergreens-geoduck-mascot

@reese

It looks like it allows it? never tried tho.

@reese I don't know, all I know is that this is the disk utility for windows:

@joepie91 @riley I don't think it matters that much whether its a docker container, OS package, git clone, etc. All of those work with ghost.

Point I was trying to make is, ghost is more self-contained, it "just works", it has its own sqlite that it uses if you don't configure a db connection, for example. Its minimum viable setup documentation is at **least** 3 times shorter than oldschool WordPress.

And hey, if someone uses one of those sysadmin app store projects, chances are they're a click away from a working secure config for ghost that receives updates.

Docker may not solve maintenance but in my experience it makes maintenance way easier, but that's neither here nor there. Some people like it some people hate it. But I'll say I've been using ghost for about 8 years, most of that time in docker, and besides having to do some maintenance on my custom template, I've had zero problems. I never had to go into the container to fix something, just upload the new version of the template into the web UI. Or take / restore a backup using the web UI.

The point of what I'm talking about: this software does not force me to live in the CLI. I can set it up once in CLI and barely touch it besides version upgrades for like 8 years. And when i do have to go into CLI, i'm always just editing docker compose. When I update the image version, no need to worry about nodejs version conflicts with other apps or anything like that.

@riley @joepie91 @ariadne@treehouse.systems

Not to mention the very platform we are talking on right now is a testament to the progress made towards breaking down barriers between users and admins.

Mastodon / other ActivityPub projects have a lot of the same pain points that wordpress did, or worse, but the fact that this network exists at all and is growing (it seems to have achieved enough "network effect" to "take off", i.e., its not going to disappear in a year) is definitely something.

5-10 years ago those "this just isn't possible" people would have claimed that something like the ActivityPub network will never happen because its too hard for sysadmins to build and maintain something that users will continue to choose to use _**instead of**_ something like twitter.

@riley @joepie91 @ariadne@treehouse.systems

Well first of all there has been a proliferation of "sysadmin app-store" projects that dramatically cut down on the amount of linux config work that folks have to do in order to do web publishing on their own hardware or to operate their own web services. Here are some of them:

https://coopcloud.tech/
https://nextcloud.com/
https://yunohost.org/
https://syncloud.org/
https://freedombox.org/

Second of all, more and more important "types of things" are seeing new application releases that have dramatically improved usability for the sysadmin -- remember how much of a massive PITA it was to set up WordPress? Well now you can set up Ghost with just a single `docker compose up`. In the past if you wanted to host your own video livestream... Good luck. It would have been very arcane and prone to the reliability issues that joepie was talking about. But now there is https://owncast.online which is very simple to set up and works reliably every time.

IMO Owncast is a great case study / inspiration on a very usable app that is friendly to the less-technical sysadmin. Gabe did an amazing job with it within the technical limitations and challenges of live video streaming... I would love to see more apps like this and honestly I think we will.

@joepie91 @riley @ariadne@treehouse.systems

Maybe off topic but IMO attacking the distinction between sysadmin and end-user is a lot more interesting and actionable, plus it has a recent history full of big wins.