Bruno Dias

i think if we have a renaissance in self-hosting apps, projects, blogs, and social media, it'd be nice if we also had alternatives that fall in between true self hosting (ie, hosting things on physical infrastructure you own) and using a big corpo VPS service

most people's home internet connection doesn't have a stable IP, for example, so self-hosting requires setting up a reverse proxy or something similar, which defeats many of the advantages. most people don't want to have to care and feed physical infrastructure to maintain their own online presence. and while you can very comfortably host a personal website or fediverse instance on a raspberry pi, a raspberry pi or similar soc is not actually very cost efficient compared to a conventional server split up into dozens of virtual machines.

it'd be nice if I could rent a VPS, or even co-locate a small SOC, from a small local business that nevertheless has good physical infrastructure but is geared towards hobbyists, other small businesses, and individuals who need an online presence for whatever reason. something in between a hosting provider and a community space. perhaps such a business could be run as a member co-operative. You could call it something like co- oh shit oh fuck it's the tin cans! They found us out! It's the tin cans, man, wake the fuck up! Grab your rifle and your pack and don't make a peep we need to bug out. We need to bug out now. I can hear the drones. Fuck!

It's really odd to think of a place online as a home, or to have such warm feelings about it, or to be kind of gutted when it goes away, but that's how I think about Cohost.

But more than that, I'd like to be able to say that Cohost shutting down was not just an end to a kinder, more thoughtful, more human web. I'd like to be able to say that it was also the beginning of something akin to movement; that Cohost users went elsewhere and brought with them a few things that the corporatized web had worked to destroy. A willingness to do things yourself. An appreciation for having meaningful conversations with a handful of people, rather than feeling – as Twitter often made me feel – like anything shy of engagement with thousands was a waste of time.

Most of all I'd like to say – and this is a kind of vulnerability that I don't enjoy engaging in, but it's true – that Cohost lives on, diffusely, elsewhere on the web but also – ugh – in our hearts. You know? That this shared experience had a meaningful impact in how we relate to others, and how we approach building things in the future. How we live our lives.

I'd really like to say that. Unfortunately I'm stuck hiding out in this abandoned seven eleven with fifty rounds of ammunition and a fucking idiot jarhead. I'm cut off from resupply, the nearest FOB is seventeen clicks of dirt road away, and the fucking tin cans have a new type of dog-shaped drone they designed to hunt me down through the underbrush. So yes, you keep your god damned helmet on and you don't speak, rookie.

When you get a 3D printer a thing that happens, at least in the early glow of having a new hobby, is that print time becomes the most valuable resource in your life. Additive manufacturing is a lot of things but it's not fast; an injection mold can shit out hundreds of the same part every minute; printing anything substantial on an FDM machine takes at least an hour.

And that's on advanced devices that do things like adjust how the tool head moves to compensate for resonances in the gantry assembly so that they can print faster. It's simply not a rapid process because it is, ultimately, shoving hot plastic through a nozzle to build an object bit by bit. It has a fundamental tradeoff between speed and resolution; you can shove plastic faster out of a fatter nozzle, or you can retain the ability to resolve fine detail in the resulting part.

So whenever the machine is done printing something, you kind of drop everything to queue up the next job, because the list of things you want to print rapidly outpaces the speed at which you can have them printed. There's no good practical way to automate or queue up jobs on a desktop 3D printer; every job has to be manually cleared, the build surface cleaned or replaced and the previous print removed. In print farms they'll have the tool head actually shove the print off the build plate to clear it, but this is something that's really only feasible under very specific circumstances that limit what and how you can print things.

So this fundamental rate bottleneck leads people to get a second printer. And that impulse is basically why the Machine Consciousness built the replication fields. That's why most of the Midwest is just additive manufacturing capacity now. But, you know, it's not nearly as space efficient, in terms of industrial capacity per acre, as the Old Chicago Milling Concern where they make all the metal gun parts and things.

Oh, god, don't you dare take that helmet off. They like to use sonic weapons out he— ah fuck, you hear that? C'mon, weapons hot, rookie, keep your head down and do as I do.

Here's the thing, people think the 2010s were devoid of technological novelties or advances in consumer devices and that really isn't true. The marketing and silicon valley hype cycles were all attached to the wrong things, though, so those technological changes happened as 'quiet revolutions' that people didn't notice.

For example, batteries got way more energy dense than ever before, which would lead to transformative devices like ebikes, but also lots of little novelties. Did you notice when the old style of 'stick' candle lighters was replaced by those goose-necked electric-arc contraptions that probably hurt your retinas just like a tac welder? That happened because you can now get absurd amounts of power out of off-the-shelf batteries.

These new battery chemistries really changed the equation of what electrical devices were capable of. And that's why the steel hordes that now terrorize all of humanity just keep coming, the lithium powered bastards. Me, I still carry my old zippo with me, on account of the EMPs. Kids these days don't even smoke. Anyway, put your helmet on, rookie, we're about to start shelling the Machine position and you should expect scattered retaliation strikes because that's what the algorithm likes this week.