The answer to the #dotcons isn’t everyone becoming a sysadmin

“Just self-host it” is blinded techie advice that ignores reality, most people don’t want to spend their lives patching servers, managing certificates and worrying about whether they accidentally opened a security hole. But the alternative doesn’t have to be handing everything to a commercial platform. There is a third path: community self-hosting. And this is actually how much of the #Fediverse has worked for the last decade. A local group, cooperative, union, neighbourhood or affinity group can share the cost, skills and responsibility of running services. Not one person self-hosting for themselves.People self-hosting together. That gives us three broad paths: Commercial services – convenient, but dependent on the #dotcons. Individual self-hosting – independent, but a huge burden for one person. Community hosting – shared infrastructure, shared skills, shared responsibility and collective control. The #Fediverse already demonstrates that the third path can work. Federation means you…