💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20210716 captured on 2022-04-29 at 12:23:51.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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Maintainer's Remorse ==================== There's an ongoing discussion on the circumlunar.space bulletin board ranging around several topics: the complexity of modern software, poor documentation, the tendency to shift to containerized solutions (a la Solene's recent blog), the loss of expertise among server admins (who I would say are making the migration from server mechanic to server technician status[1]), and lastly, how the direction of all of this is making "IT as a hobby" less fun. I want to tackle that last point. If you self-host anything, gopher, gemini, websites, your own "cloud", etc., you're engaged in IT as a hobby. None of us have to do those things. We could find and pay for reasonably secure, privacy-respecting alternatives in the majority of cases. For example, I don't need to run a radicale server. I trust that Posteo would host my calendar and contacts ethically for me. We do that kind of thing because we like DIY and we do it on principle: we want to personally understand the systems we use, and we feel a little more control in a world that works hard to centralize expertise and pull us into walled and surveilled gardens. I'm sure there are many additional reasons, but those undoubtedly fit many of us. There's a cost to DIY IT though. I mentioned in that discussion on circumlunar.space that I have a file on my computer called "server mess." I created it one night due to the angst of having six different servers on the go. Some were quite easy to set up: none moreso than my gopher server. Others involved full days (or more) of following instructions, editing byzantine config files, testing by trial and error, etc. My linux skills are limited and setting up particular services was a real challenge, especially since open source software is often quite poorly documented. It's hard to RTFM when there isn't one. Man pages, if they exist, often include certain leaps in logic that assume the user knows something that they don't. How many times have you figured out how to install and configure a piece of software from many different websites -- cobbling together advice on different distro versions or from different distributions entirely? I use Debian, which is quite popular. There are a lot of support articles for Debian and Ubuntu out there. But I've learned a lot from the Arch Linux website. In any case, here's the crux of the problem. Once you've got things up and running, you've created an ongoing set of obligations. Set up another program and you've just added to your obligations. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. First, you need to maintain those installations. That's (potentially) easy if the installations involved something like an apt-get and a config file. It's harder if you got the software from a git repository or downloaded a package from a website. Did you record your steps? Did you include comments on why you did what you did in the config files? Are you going to remember how this all works later? Do you need to check that git repository or website periodically for updates? Second, you need to make backups. There are various ways of doing this. I'm not sure how many people fully automate their backups, but my scripts still require a bit of intervention, so I need to trigger the backup process every once in a while. I should fully automate the backups including rsyncing them all somewhere. You can criticize me for that. I accept it. But have you done recent backups? Lastly, you're the tech support. When something stops working, you're responsible. You have to find out what went wrong. Do you even remember how you installed and configured the damn thing? Did you write it all down or are there a dozen different sites on the setup of that particular software bookmarked in your browser? If it's the latter, congratulations, you get to relearn how to navigate that maze all over again! That brings me to the central point of this phlog entry. The person who started the discussion at circumlunar.space said that they were tired of it all. So am I. I have maintainer's remorse. I keep that "server mess" text file on my computer so that I don't add to it. The mountain of obligation is large enough already. Someone on gopher or gemini recently wrote about the mental anguish created by having unsorted files all over your computer. It's kind of like that. Ugh. All that chaos. These days, when I look for a solution to a problem, I look for the absolute minimum effort option. I try to avoid self-hosting anything. One example is notes. I have looked for simple, syncable self-hosted note-taking software. I've never found anything usable[2]. So I have all my notes in a single text file. I email that file back and forth when I make changes. It's searchable. There are redundant, incremental backups on my laptop, my phone, and in my email account. It's good enough. For that matter, a paper notebook would have been good enough. And it wouldn't have required any setup or maintenance. ----------- [1] See gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7evisiblink/phlog/20210710 [2] Joplin would be usable if it wasn't a huge electron mess that barely starts on my phone. SilentNotes would also be good, but it's only available for Windows and Android.