And people wonder why the average person isn’t embracing the fediverse

I find being able to choose my instance based on their moderation and federation policies much less obtuse than the black-box algorithms and shadow-banning of the mainstream corporate platforms.

IMO, the average person not embracing the fediverse has much less to do with any flaws in the fediverse (these do exist, don’t get me wrong) and much more to do with inertia, the network effect, and just lack of knowledge or fucks to give about privacy and open platforms.

Hey sorry for the late reply, I just wanted to say I really appreciate your perspective here! It’s definitely made me simmer down a bit instead of jumping in head first. I’ll try it out for myself and a few friends first before trying to recruit everyone I know :P

Part of why I want to do this is that I do want to learn more about all the stuff you mentioned (except Kubernetes, gosh everytime I look up documentation for it I drown in a swarm of terminology).

As who very much doesn’t work in IT, computer stuff is a fun hobby for me. I can see how assuming the responsibilities for hosting an instance could make it less fun and more work, though.

None of my selfhosted stuff is available to the public internet, I run everything through Wireguard. However I do know how to get SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt because of previous messing around.

Backups is definitely something that I’m lazy about with my selfhosting that I’d need to address for a public service. I currently just manually copy over the few essential files I have to my server, my desktop and my phone. If I commit to hosting stuff for others, proper backups are definitely at the top of the priority list.

Governance is something I’ve already thought a lot about, since these services would be aimed at a specific minority community.

Thanks for your comment! I’m currently messing about with Hugo to build a landing page to explain decentralized, federated servers and link to services I might host in the future. I really want to do this, I don’t want to just accept that the common communication platforms are controlled by American fascists.