Exactly Sean. The solution is self-hosting. What I'd like to see is people making that easier, not making outsourcing the whole thing to third parties easier. There seems to be this idea floating around that doing that is somehow "good"  and that it can be done in a way to respect people's freedom, autonomy, and privacy all at the same time.

Jason Self at 2014-11-13T23:43:17Z

It's a foot in the door. Truth be told, I think the overall federation of networks inherently allows for different configurations of servers, pods, and hubs running on a variety of platforms and services. Some people wouldn't mind taking an easy shortcut rather than having to self-administer every aspect of a server. Others are comfortable with joining community hubs, and some will start community hubs for other people based around interest, organization, or locality.

It should be easier, but the reality is that self-hosting has a number of technical hurdles that an individual person has to overcome.

Sean Tilley at 2014-11-14T08:44:27Z

Not least of which is restrictions placed by their ISPs.

@jpope suddenly finding out that he needs to rent 1 or more VPSs because $ISP now has data caps is an example of why (under the current US model) true self-hosting is not practical for most people.

lnxwalt@microca.st at 2014-11-14T16:08:36Z

X11R5, Doug Whitfield likes this.

My income is basically derived from doing what IndieHosters will do. I am the technical contact for dozens of domains, and control the entire stack for many companies. But I have a contract that protects them (and me), and I make sure they have as much access as is practical. For instance, none of my clients have root access to the server where their site is hosted, but they do have access to all the code (I keep all deployments in public repos) and I send them their backups regularly (for the really big sites, I rotate flash cards onsite when I visit, with the latest filesystem and db dump). They could (hire someone to) move their site away from my hosting without my involvement and send me a message to stop charging them, and it says as much in our contract.

Of course it should be easier. Everything should be easier. But IT is hard. And there are relatively few resources being used to making it easier to run networked services. I greatly profit from WordPress, probably the web software that has the best power to ease-of-use ratio, and it is still too complicated for most folks to install (and maybe use, I am sure I am very biased). And this is a cake, so if you want to eat it to, then we have to argue against the voices that admonish the race to the lowest common denominator of hosting that is prevalent around these parts. One-click installs are fairly easy, but I don't think anyone really wants that.

IndieHosters aren't just offering a service, they are working on tech to make hosting easier, despite the complexity of the software involved. It is very practical (which is surprising they said that about fedsocweb motherships), and I wish them the best. I wish I could pay other folks to host a lot of the software I do now, like GitLab. I'll be keeping an eye on them. ^_^

maiki at 2014-11-14T20:01:34Z