We tell each other to self host in order to escape the big corps. But when we die, all the self hosted stuff is going to get wiped and history will only remember the archives that got stored by the big corps. And you know how history is written by the winners. Do we need a way to automatically hand over our sites to archive.org or similar? Or send them disc images? Nobody expects to get run over by a car but some of us will, today. I made no plans for this.
I’m afraid nobody would know what to do in my immediate circle of friends, sadly. 😢 And I don’t have any admin buddies that would be able handle it all. Perhaps I just need to talk to one or two and see how interested they are in the subject. And perhaps it would make sense to pick a buddy that’s not the same age, too!
And then there’s a more fundamental problem with self hosting: it leads to alienation. “Mine! Mine! Host your own!” When in fact I would love to have small groups of people share. Not many of us, to be sure. Ten or twenty at most. Where everybody can be heard without us paying the cost of consensus democracy. The price is real, sadly: endless discussions where consensus is sought in all decisions. This takes a lot of time and patience. The German Wikipedia article is better than the English one in explaining, I’m afraid.
Small coops running servers and services for their members should have limits and procedures in place that make sure the coop can and will split amiably when the threshold is reached and that means before we all get pissed at each other.
#Administration #Philosophy