The romantic idea of people running their own servers has never been sustainable. The reason that the Internet centralized was because, outside of a small group of people, no one wants to put in the effort and investment to self host all services.
Most users aren’t going to accept “sure it is broken, but you are free” as a reason why they can’t go to their favorite communities. They are going to find communities that don’t break down as often, either on Lemmy or somewhere else.
email, usenet, fidonet, irc, phpbb, invision, bbses say hello
i ran forums of 10k users and “paying for it” was never the problem
we didnt stop hosting these because we got tired of it, we stopped because people ran off to centralized networks because so many were convinced being on the “same domain” is the best idea via marketing.
two big lies have been perpetuated on the modern internet:
running your own server is hard
only big companies can do it
nothing was wrong with the old system other than the fact that individual forums are not going to spend money to out-market valley VC’s
people either want systems that represent them, or they want to be on systems that represent others first. I don’t think they realize these are the decisions they are making, since most have no knowledge of what the internet truly is.
I never said hard, I said not worth doing. Think of the number of hours you spend in a month to keep your servers running. Maybe 4? Half a weekend?
What kind of internet connection do you need to host this? Can you get away with a basic cable internet package? Could you have done that 10 years ago? What kind of server do you run? How often do you need to replace either parts of it or all of it? I’m not going to ask about software costs since you are likely going FOSS and the real cost to that software is time, mentioned above.
So, as an expert in your field, how much money and time does it take for you? Now, what about others? Are they going to be able to spend the time and money it took you to get to your level? Do they want to if they have other interests?
Also, you’ve been doing sysadmin work of some form for about 3 decades. That puts you in a very small subset of knowledge holders. I think you are underplaying your knowledge base; it would be like a auto mechanic telling me I can rotate my tires and change my oil.
And why should the scrubs git gud when they can pay someone to do the hard work for them.
I understand my knowledge base is kind of big here, running this is a small subset for me. However, I have worked in a number of areas in the last few years where the goal was to get “rank and file” folks to run servers of thier own. This was a scenario where normal people had a desire to run thier own servers and were willing to learn the process.
I helped multiple non technical (some only phone users) stand up ubuntu VMs and run through the process of setting up the server. The process was OVER 20 steps. That motivator was imporant of course, and I do believe there are people that are motivated like that simply to support fedi or own thier space (marginalized folks particularly).
I didn’t use any special skills to help them beyond patience, I didn’t write the docs and I often supplied links to docs or man pages as questions to answers so, given the right desire, people will do it. Owning your presence, certainly a motivator to many, and based on the desires to dump money on servers, there is clearly also a desire to help, if running a server has a 1-click, lets point them to it.
That said, paying for a managed instance is a good play IMO, the legal arrangement around running a managed system is decidedly different than that of posting on a centralized system, by default you have both more technical and legal control of that space so its a win.
Yeah. And I get why people would want to create their own Internet infrastructure, both in terms of ownership of the data and service as well as being able to have more control as to how it runs.
That said, while I am not a sysadmin nor a programmer, I do work in a computer reliant industry and I don’t see anywhere near the combination of technical competence and motivation to create your own server. If anything, I see people fight just to learn how to do basic things.
I see people fight just to learn how to do basic things.
this was my general experience as well before the last few years, I found it fascinating that once people had it in their heads to “figure it out” how quickly they really did… I have noticed a growing trend of people working hard to make it seem like all this is harder than it is either for basal marketing reasons or for others that I can only guess at. Its hard to quantify how damaging simply posting articles on topics without date/time stamps can be and that’s such a massive part of tech docs in this day and age its breathtaking.
IMO we NEED LLMs to help cut through the bull. it REALLY is not as hard as people would have you believe, we make up words ,and sometimes because computers are dumb, we have to take more steps than you might think about normally.
The romantic idea of people running their own servers has never been sustainable. The reason that the Internet centralized was because, outside of a small group of people, no one wants to put in the effort and investment to self host all services.
Most users aren’t going to accept “sure it is broken, but you are free” as a reason why they can’t go to their favorite communities. They are going to find communities that don’t break down as often, either on Lemmy or somewhere else.
email, usenet, fidonet, irc, phpbb, invision, bbses say hello
i ran forums of 10k users and “paying for it” was never the problem
we didnt stop hosting these because we got tired of it, we stopped because people ran off to centralized networks because so many were convinced being on the “same domain” is the best idea via marketing.
two big lies have been perpetuated on the modern internet:
nothing was wrong with the old system other than the fact that individual forums are not going to spend money to out-market valley VC’s
people either want systems that represent them, or they want to be on systems that represent others first. I don’t think they realize these are the decisions they are making, since most have no knowledge of what the internet truly is.
I never said hard, I said not worth doing. Think of the number of hours you spend in a month to keep your servers running. Maybe 4? Half a weekend?
What kind of internet connection do you need to host this? Can you get away with a basic cable internet package? Could you have done that 10 years ago? What kind of server do you run? How often do you need to replace either parts of it or all of it? I’m not going to ask about software costs since you are likely going FOSS and the real cost to that software is time, mentioned above.
So, as an expert in your field, how much money and time does it take for you? Now, what about others? Are they going to be able to spend the time and money it took you to get to your level? Do they want to if they have other interests?
Downvote rather than argue, thanks for showing your colors.
I was running forums in the 90s. I was lucky living near the space coast, and I shared my fortune with others online. Still do.
These are not expensive or hard to run, and they werent back then either. I guess to that I say…git gud scrub
I didn’t downvote you.
Also, you’ve been doing sysadmin work of some form for about 3 decades. That puts you in a very small subset of knowledge holders. I think you are underplaying your knowledge base; it would be like a auto mechanic telling me I can rotate my tires and change my oil.
And why should the scrubs git gud when they can pay someone to do the hard work for them.
apologies then.
I understand my knowledge base is kind of big here, running this is a small subset for me. However, I have worked in a number of areas in the last few years where the goal was to get “rank and file” folks to run servers of thier own. This was a scenario where normal people had a desire to run thier own servers and were willing to learn the process.
I helped multiple non technical (some only phone users) stand up ubuntu VMs and run through the process of setting up the server. The process was OVER 20 steps. That motivator was imporant of course, and I do believe there are people that are motivated like that simply to support fedi or own thier space (marginalized folks particularly).
I didn’t use any special skills to help them beyond patience, I didn’t write the docs and I often supplied links to docs or man pages as questions to answers so, given the right desire, people will do it. Owning your presence, certainly a motivator to many, and based on the desires to dump money on servers, there is clearly also a desire to help, if running a server has a 1-click, lets point them to it.
That said, paying for a managed instance is a good play IMO, the legal arrangement around running a managed system is decidedly different than that of posting on a centralized system, by default you have both more technical and legal control of that space so its a win.
Yeah. And I get why people would want to create their own Internet infrastructure, both in terms of ownership of the data and service as well as being able to have more control as to how it runs.
That said, while I am not a sysadmin nor a programmer, I do work in a computer reliant industry and I don’t see anywhere near the combination of technical competence and motivation to create your own server. If anything, I see people fight just to learn how to do basic things.
this was my general experience as well before the last few years, I found it fascinating that once people had it in their heads to “figure it out” how quickly they really did… I have noticed a growing trend of people working hard to make it seem like all this is harder than it is either for basal marketing reasons or for others that I can only guess at. Its hard to quantify how damaging simply posting articles on topics without date/time stamps can be and that’s such a massive part of tech docs in this day and age its breathtaking.
IMO we NEED LLMs to help cut through the bull. it REALLY is not as hard as people would have you believe, we make up words ,and sometimes because computers are dumb, we have to take more steps than you might think about normally.