and its been this way my whole life.
I got into self hosting cause me and my friends wanted to play some games and i figured id google how to run the servers for them. We didnt know what the fuck we were doing. We just wanted to run game and chat servers so we could play the stuff we wanted, we started out Windows Server 2008 on random computers given to us by someone who knew someone who knew someone. and I enjoyed it so I kept doing it. Me and my friend ran free teamspeaks for a couple hundred people because we just felt like it, we ran a plex server, we torrented stuff, we ran minecraft and other random game servers. We ran git, some websites, some forums too. All on like a $30/month (at the time) dedicated server- kinda expensive, but my friend felt like paying for it, and others chipped in when they could. they wanted stuff run for them, we wanted to run stuff, it was a good fit!
like you cannot model this shit as rugged individualism. if we want to break away from central services we need to think about this in terms of communities. if you hate self hosting then you shouldnt be the one doing it! If the ball doesn't fit in your mouth it's not yours.
In the circles I run in, there's some people who know how to 3D print and do that for others. Some people who do baking. Some people who do sewing. Some people who do fermenting or w/e, some who do drawing, mushroom growing, soldering, poetry, whatever. people do the shit that they enjoy doing and they share it with others, and thats the only way this works, because nobody actually wants or can do literally everything.
but to do this we need to build communities. and devs need to build stuff designed for communities to run. Not everyone knows that one person who will host shit. I wonder if maybe it used to be easier to know that one person. before software became so centralized, people were doing self-hosting just out of necessity. they weren't a huge nerd about it they stumbled into it because they had to. but then some stayed cause they liked it. Some became huge nerds about it like me, others just stayed there kinda doing their thing. thats it!
Like, I consider myself EXTREMELY good at hosting software because I have the expertise, freedom, and financial resources1 and would probably do it much more often for others if hosting didn't also entail moderation (which I am NOT good at). Like, yeah, I could delegate moderation to others but:
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I don't know anyone who is chomping at the bit to moderate stuff I host for free
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The host is always implicitly treated as the "top mod"
… because they have essentially admin privilege. Unless you have a good constitution in place for the community you form a lot of conflicts end up bubbling up straight to the admin(s) to resolve.
I don't know a good way to fix this, though.
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I'm also really good at hosting most servers inexpensively for just a few bucks a month tops so it's not even a real financial burden on me
honestly, the only way i've seen to work around that is to, uh... be the host for someone else lol
in particular, I have a friend or two I help host fediverse instances for. that way, i basically just work on the tech, making sure it's up and running the way it should, and they're in charge of moderating and curating their own instance experience. i have no power over how their instances are moderated - and i don't want that power1. i just get to focus on what i'm good at - messing with server stuff.
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i've done it a time or two in the past - i wasn't good at it2, and if you had the misfortune of being on a site i was a mod/admin on, i am deeply sorry.
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yes i know i'm probably better than i was then, on account of the fact that i have that experience and know what doesn't work. ...still don't think i'd be a good moderator.
