the state of tech accessibility is miserable by choice and just as there is little anyone who isnt a politician can do about legislation but yell and try to be difficult to ignore, the onus to make web tech better is actually on the people who hold the reins and have the power to steer it.
and for once i don't mean the corporations! the people who manage back-end web software need to be told that "if you want to have a personal website you need to use the command line to ssh into a vps and use three different package managers to arrange a fucking house of cards of dependencies and if any of them fails, fuck yourself and die" is not a reasonable expectation, and if they give a single shit about picking up users who aren't six-figure corporate IT department employees, they should probably divert some of the effort they're spending on cutting-edge edge cases toward just having a user experience that isn't miserable.
the thing is i'm not even sure most of that kind of tech nerd is aware of how people who havent dedicated their life to computers as an end unto themselves perceive some of this shit. i still remember this writeup that was intended to sell mastodon to people and had this passage in it:
Imagine if your student dorm could run your own copy of twitter, with your own users and rules and so on. And your girlfriend’s commune could run their own smol twitter themselves. And your twitter sites can communicate and interact.
And in addition to that, everybody can run their own instagrams, their own youtubes, and they communicate between themselves and one another. So you can subscribe to your girlfriend's commune's video streaming site from your student dorm's microblogging site.
nobody fucking wants this, but also trying to do this with the fediverse stuff as it currently exists would drive even most tech hobbyists insane! i looked into setting up a mastodon or pleroma instance and what i learned was i should write off the fediverse entirely until major structural changes1 happen that the current leadership doesn't care about doing!
anyway this is mostly vent-ramble but the takeaway is yes, it is not a feasible solution right now for everyone to move to personal websites or mastodon, i agree. and what i want to add is we need to yell at the people who are steering those ships until they change course.
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did you know that there is no mechanism to export/import server-level blocklists on mastodon, and the leadership refuses to either do this or allow whitelisting? i wrote a blog post about this here https://blorgblorgbl.org/posts/mast-of-don/
There has to be a happy medium. It's not feasible for every single person to run their own bare-metal server or virt or whatever and it shouldn't have to be. It's hard! It's hard work, that's why people like me get paid to do that work. It's nothing to me to run my own little web server and stuff but that's because it has been my life for the past 25 fucking years doing that shit from single little servers to shit that runs in fleets of thousands of hosts and has tens and hundreds of millions of users. Not everyone can or should or especially should have to invest decades of their life so they can put up a homepage.
At the same time, that doesn't mean there should be or can be a push-button-receive-bacon solution any more than the solution to "everyone can't build their own car from the ground up" is "Heathkit cars that you can somehow assemble with an Allen key like Ikea furniture". That's silly.
So the question is what does that middle look like? How do we make a sustainable environment that lets people who have the ability and resources set up systems that can host things for people so we can enable folks that way without everybody having to learn how to hack nginx configs and read every CVE that comes down the pike? How do we break this innate assumption that the only things that exist in the world are fully atomized people in a big wide open black space, and giant evil corporations and state actors, and absolutely nothing else?
