Maiki, thanks for your post and the thoughts and all what it generates.

When I knew about free software, I understood it as a very powerful tool to bring high technology to 'everybody'. However, free software + cheap hardware are not enough to be a solution. A barrier of "knowledge", "know-how" has to be bridged too, and a barrier of "network effect", and a barrier of "culture", legal barriers, and many others.

I agree that we should aim to build stuff that is available for everybody, and that 'everybody' includes many many people that won't read complex documentation or won't try to solve the problems that will appear in their deployment/usage/upgrades: if it doesn't work "as-is", they will give up, and use other thing. So, yes, we should aim lower.

But we need lots of help in other technical and non-technical areas too, and we cannot put that burden in developers, we need other kind of people to also work with 'everybody' in their mind.

One example is translations (if it does not talk their language, they will not use it). Devs do their job making the internationalization part, and then it's up to us to believe that it's important that a piece of software is in a certain language, and then, translate it.

We also need sysadmins and people providing infrastructure for small communities: people using Facebook (and not hosting it obviously) shouldn't have to go for self-hosting their social network as the only option (even if it's the best one). That's why I'm deeply respectful and thankful to@Joar Wandborg for hosting gobblin.se, for example, or to @luisgf for hosting MiPump.es (even if I don't use it), and of course, to @Evan Prodromou. That's why I become so happy when, for example, a public organization as my University, decides to use free software to provide a service to all their members. The software being difficult to deploy may look a barrier, yes, but I don't think that it is the main barrier. Are the people actually deploying super-heroes? Well, they are my super-heroes, but not for 'being able to deploy X', but for 'willing to deploy X and offering to others'.

I don't know if a homeless could/should host Mediagoblin, but what I know is that we, as society, should provide community sites for the 'essential' communication needs for everybody (the same as we, as society, once decided to provide the postal services to everybody, or to build public libraries). Being myself a public servant, I'll try to push this 'public responsability' as much as I can. But I'm also a child of the working class, and I know about we civil society organizing by our own to build our own networks, our own means, and spread our own voice, and strenghten the community. It seems that all that became old-fashioned, not needed, when wether companies wether public administrations seemed to cover all the needs that we had. But that was an illusion, and we always needed to keep on empowering ourselves, and empowering the poorest of ourselves. Now we just need to keep on working with that in mind, with any tool that is on our side, the easy to deploy, and the difficult ones too (so they will become easier).