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I’m confused because the article talks about self hosting on a VPS and how many self hosted services could stand up to legal action?
That sounds like it’s describing running a public service for others. Self-hosting IMO is running something for yourself, it doesn’t even need to be on the public internet 99% of the time.
Running a service for others is just plain old hosting.
I’ve self hosted long before the privacy/subscription nightmare of modern cloud/SaaS platforms was a thing. I do it because I enjoy it (and at the time I got started, I had crap internet so having good local services like offline Wikipedia was important).
Not everyone has to self-host. I run lots of services, mostly for myself, but friends and family who don’t know a kernel driver from a school bus driver also use them. So the expectation that everyone self host is and always has been “pie in the sky”. And that’s okay.
Privacy regulations are all fine and dandy, but even with the strictest ones in place, you still do not own or control your data. You’re still subscribing to services instead of owning software. You can’t extend, modify, or customize hosted software. Self hosting FOSS applications addresses all of those.
So rather than expect everyone to self-host, we should be working towards communities offering services to one another, pooling resources, and letting those interoperate with each other.
To make fun of an old moral panic in the 90s: “It’s 11pm. Do you know where your data is?” Yep, it’s down the street in Matt’s house.
Right. I think the real vision isn’t that every single person self-hosts, but every community has somebody in it who does the self-hosting for the community. Everybody can be independent like villages instead of totally centralized like empires
every community has somebody in it who does the self-hosting for the community
That’s what (e.g.) Google and Facebook do: Host software for the community.
You can’t extend, modify, or customize hosted software. Self hosting FOSS applications addresses all of those.
But:
rather than expect everyone to self-host, we should be working towards communities offering services to one another
How exactly are “communities offering services” a different thing than “hosted software”?
Nah, self-hosting is still a solution. And when I self-host, I don’t even need an internet connection to access my files, movies, photos, security cameras, etc.
Yes, we can fix privacy laws, and put in a lot of faith that they will be followed or that our data won’t be lost/sold. But I think everyone benefits when they are in control of their own data.
What we need are more accessible self-hosting options so that even computer n00bs can set up and cut ties with these mega corps.
