2 Live Crew, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar

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.

1. 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?

I still think it's really important that federated media networks exist because:

1. It's way harder for a single bad actor (i.e CEO) to fuck everything up in the name of profit chasing
2. They're useful for weaning people off of the mono-platform hell that the modern internet has been forced into and reminding people how websites used to work and still SHOULD work
3. Open standards for internet communication can last for ages even with moderate adoption. No one can "take down" the concept of IRC or E-Mail, even if huge mono-platforms have done their best to try and get everyone on a single service for them. You're still usually able to take your data and set up elsewhere using the same backend service, and that's a critical difference. Sure it really sucks when your Masto instance goes under, but it's a hell of a lot easier than losing a proprietary site
4. Federation makes it much easier to archive content when much of it is already stored across multiple independent servers run by different maintainers

The whole debacle of Reddit's execs burning down the website recently made me think about this more since the same network of micro-communities could be achieved just by a bunch of individual forums networked together with a single-sign-on tying them together. like how forums worked in the 90s and 2000s, just with the option to network them together and not having to make a new account for every community.

I think there are some things that can be done to make federated networks more resilient to individual nodes dropping out, like having each node naturally keep a partial duplicate of some other nodes on the network per the admin's consent, thus allowing for possible failover instances during downtime, etc.

But I think one of the fundamental changes that needs to happen to the internet as a whole is to demystify web hosting and site creation to the modern web user. Services like Wix or Linode kinda help with this, but at the end of the day, they're still proprietary services for a single host. We need a host-agnostic tool with user-friendly UX that can guide a user through the process of buying a domain and/or remote server instance, selecting your website you want to host, or allowing you to select from several open-source server apps that you want to host from an app store-like interface.

We also need better open tools for making websites to go along with that which don't either throw the user into the deep end of HTML coding or lock down so much that you can't make anything other than a bland web-modernist-sludge page.

Once hosting a game server, personal site, or social media node is simple enough for even the slightly-technically-inclined person to do with a platform-agnostic tool, I think people will start seeing webhosting as a lot less daunting.

the potential is there. like, pre-highschool kids who are the slightest bit "good with computers" are out there setting up minecraft servers for their friends.

many computer people, especially webapp developers, love to complicate things and then turn around and say "o, woe! this system is far too difficult and complex for unskilled hands! pray give me the controller, so that i may control it for you." when we need them to say "òwó this system is too difficult and complex! better make it understandable and reasonable to set up so i'm actually empowering people with my work instead of perpetuating the cycle of people-farming"

is that it's not a one-and-done thing. It's a time commitment that is:

• ongoing
• permanent, as long as the server is up
• to monitor its usage
• to respond with manual updates to security issues
• that scales with the number of components that are needed for the server to run

(e.g. for Mastodon, also with Postgres, with Elasticsearch etc.)

It is a time commitment I literally, a person who has a godforsaken master's in computer science engineering and can absolutely if grumpily look into bootstrapping Linux from scratch if she needs to, absolutely cannot commit to.

And this is on top of keeping up with the social side of whatever activity is occurring on the server itself, if it is serving or receiving materials from or on behalf of others.

right, so the problem statement here is that we want the things-being-hosted to be

• easier to wrap your head around, such that a greater number of people are eligible to host things, including people with more free time to dedicate, and as a result there are enough people literate in the art of hosting things that the burden need not fall entirely on one person, but on a trusted group
• less burdensome to the people doing the hosting, such that less free time and energy are required to begin with
• built for portable identities and data (and with appropriate things encrypted), such that there's less of a commitment of trust and dependency for the user to place on the hoster
• and crucially, resistant to corporate capture

it feels like the effort being invested into software projects always hard focuses on end-user-friendliness at the expense of everything that it needs to be sustainable

Not cohost, cohost is still cool! But Twitter, Reddit, Bluesky, Discord, all are making really fucking terrible and user-hostile decisions!!!

the era of free money is over, and all of them are panicking. they see their advertisers, data brokers, and investors as their customers, and forget that their platforms only exist and remain solvent at the whims of their users. They tailor things around the ways to make money, not realizing that advertising etc only works if people are there to lure people to the adverts.

it's a labor issue, but not as we generally think of it. but the production only happens with the users' labor.