@Ken Gahagan Don’t sweat a long reply, I find we Friendica using folks are far more interested in long form conversations haha! You’ll fit right in.

In terms of hosting and such I enjoy following @Elena Rossini ⁂ (that’s her Masto but she’s also trying out a Friendica soon). She’s someone going at it from a beginner flow and it is informative to see how long/which steps she’s gone through learning to host from complete scratch. Many Fedi guides are focused on end user members and not as much on aspiring admins, so I think it’s valuable to see and share the hosting journey because surely one of us will be clever enough to simplify that process for end users (she’s using yunohost which is a step closer).

I think admin mentorship/continued simplification will be key, and I think possible too. Cuz remember back in the day when nothing was SaaS and each individual had to install software and there was no GeekSquad? This is kinda bumping into the growing pains of that same era. But it’s possible! Because enough ppl did those manual installs for the general population to go first “what’s the internet” followed a time later by “I want that too that (insert neat thing here) is cool”. Keep building innovating and iterating 🥳

This last bit is more philosophical which is: I’ve come to believe that it’s negligent, unhealthy, and cruel of us to just not bother understanding how tech works under the hood. We crave uptime and max network effect, but it wasn’t until I had some datacenter and SaaS friends that I realized wow these are grueling jobs keeping these massive resource heavy digital operations afloat. Remember the brief pangs of ethical qualms people had over “Nike shoe sweat shops”? People give zero thought to what it takes to run 24/7 services holding millions of people. I guess people think “internet” = high pay, or that “computers” = not real because you can’t see it. But running this stuff in a centralized manner brings real harms to those who do it. Like do ppl think the social barons wanted to become Bond Villains? (Ok bad analogy, some did, but I digress…) it takes massive resources to keep it up and to hold everybody’s activity. Every time humans do one thing at critical scale, it’s always unwieldy, and that always results in exploitation to try and keep it working. Billions of people all doing the same thing from a single point of failure is destined to enshitify. Social, internet, monocrops of food, personal cars causing traffic jams, electricity coming from a single transmission line from a single type of energy source, the list goes on. When a billion people are concentrated together in one spot doing the exact same thing, it’s not manageable. Spreading out is what works. But in this case that’s gonna require us to take some personal responsibility and learn how stuff works OR help others to.

It’s like Fire. Imagine there were no safety PSA. That no local fire departments were going around teaching kids fire safety or checking on senior’s smoke alarms. Nobody knew how fire worked AT ALL. Like they couldn’t even see it or know when they were being burned by it. And that’s what we’ve done with tech. Each of us plays with fire and never learns even any basic fire safety like how to not leave a candle burning or how not to put out a grease fire or how to use a fire extinguisher. That’s kinda what we need is lots of ppl trained on how to use fire extinguishers. Yes, learning to operate a fire truck and use its equipment is a specialized skill (a hosting service). But holy smokes is it expensive to operate fire trucks!! So someone needs to keep doing the work of figuring out how to right size and distribute easy to use fire extinguishers and teach lots of ppl to use them (small scale and self fedi hosting). And some of us lay people are gonna have to step up and learn how to be volunteer fire fighters until that happens.

If I think of any other good folks to follow I’ll let you know, and you’re welcome to follow me! About 90% of the time I’m talking about fediverse newbie stuff and opportunities to try and make fire extinguishers so to speak lol