We tell each other to self host in order to escape the big corps. But
when we die, all the self hosted stuff is going to get wiped and
history will only remember the archives that got stored by the big
corps. And you know how history is written by the winners. Do we need
a way to automatically hand over our sites to archive.org or similar?
Or send them disc images? Nobody expects to get run over by a car but
some of us will, today. I made no plans for this.
I’m afraid nobody would know what to do in my immediate circle of
friends, sadly. 😢 And I don’t have any admin buddies that would be
able handle it all. Perhaps I just need to talk to one or two and see
how interested they are in the subject. And perhaps it would make
sense to pick a buddy that’s not the same age, too!
And then there’s a more fundamental problem with self hosting: it
leads to alienation. “Mine! Mine! Host your own!” When in fact I would
love to have small groups of people share. Not many of us, to be sure.
Ten or twenty at most. Where everybody can be heard without us paying
the cost of consensus democracy. The price is real, sadly: endless
discussions where consensus is sought in all decisions. This takes a
lot of time and patience. The German Wikipedia article is better than
the English one in explaining, I’m afraid.
Small coops running servers and services for their members should have
limits and procedures in place that make sure the coop can and will
split amiably when the threshold is reached and that means before we
all get pissed at each other.
