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.
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.