My response-to / thoughts-on Neil’s write up, ‘Self-host it’ is not the answer.
👹 Strapping on my devils advocate horns hat…
Neil is right, self-hosting isn’t a panacea for the ills of big tech, and barriers absolutely exist, some insurmountable for many, but I think spreading the self-hosting gospel, i.e. educating the larger populace of potential self-hosting aspirants, is a good thing. The subset of folks who could self-host but don’t is probably pretty large. Heck, that includes me! The subset of folks who never knew, or never considered self-hosting something is also non-zero. As others have pointed out, solutions/services/platforms (e.g. YunoHost) which help bridge the gap between big tech reliance and full-on self-hosting have started multiplying. Why? As a direct response to the enshittification of big tech and the growing demand that has sprung up in that wake.
So no, saying “just self-host it” isn’t really the right approach, sure. It’s a bit more nuanced than that isn’t it? As Neil has pointed out, it requires resources, time, money, know-how, etc… This is all true. But each layer of that stack can be managed in different ways, not all of them by the individual. And know-how? Is it too much to ask to have someone learn something new? You don’t need to become an SRE over night, and you should expect-to and plan for failure along the way, but you can surely figure something out in time yeah?
But let’s take a step back. To say ‘just self-host it’ isn’t the answer, let’s first try to derive/understand the question. Neil doesn’t explicitly say, but in my mind we say “just self-host it” as an answer to a (generalized) question like “big tech platform A is bad, how can I lessen my reliance on it”? In this case, the operative word is “bad”, which can mean anything from said big tech company is violating one’s privacy, enshittifiying, being sunsetted, etc… A better answer to this question is to point out the vast array of alternative options, self-hosting of course being just one of those. You also have managed hosting, FOSS alternatives, smaller/non-big-tech (though still centralized) platforms, etc… Do we have a well-known vocabulary for suggesting “managed” or partially-“managed” hosting alternatives? I don’t think so. Instead, we just tend to say “self-host it”. But I think this answer can be inclusive of more things than just, full-on, purist, I own/control the entire stack self-hosting.
Neil does make the distinction between his definition of ‘self-hosting’ and that of ‘self-managing’ (running stuff on hardware/a-platform that is not your own), but I think that this is the core problem. This vocabulary (“self-managed”) is not agreed upon, or known. He makes a lot of valid points about why “pure” self-hosting isn’t a great answer, but I think he’s taking it too literally. I think ‘self-hosting’ as the most well known term here can be thought of more inclusively as being everything from owning the whole stack, to just owning part of it (call it “partially” self-hosted if you’d like).
Rather than dismissing the idea of self-hosting as something only the most dedicated of tech nerds could possibly figure out, let’s instead continue to educate the masses on what it means to move away from big tech. How truly possible it is and what the benefits are. A more educated populace will in turn create more demand—for community hosting, managed hosting, content on how to self-host, tools to make self-hosting easier/more-secure, etc… It’s important to lay out the obstacles and pre-reqs, yes. It’s very possible to bite off more than one can chew here, but you can right-size how you approach this and ease yourself in a responsible way.