https://blog.fabiomanganiello.com/reply/the-local-tech-neighbourhoodA corollary to the concept of small tech neighbourhood is the idea of local tech communities.
It's easy for folks like me, who have been self-hosting on computers in our closets since high school, to lose track with the common non-tech person.
It's easy for us to say "just self-host your Nextcloud, Matrix, XMPP, Mastodon, Searxng, Wallabag etc.", adding a "it's just a docker run command".
I've also seen "just run your f*cking website" articles get to the top of HackerNews.
But then I thought: imagine if it was, say, the bakery industry rather than the software industry to go through a process of #enshittification.
Imagine that buying your bread or croissant tomorrow requires a $100/month Bread+ subscription with plenty of upsells, an age verification process that requires you to send your passport or retina scan to the Big Bread consortium, a tracking system that measures exactly how much bread you eat at home, and that keeps selling your eating habits to whoever wants to purchase them - all while your bread quality gets progressively worse over time, and the oligopoly that holds it, after acquiring or putting out of business any credible competitors, starts experimenting also with selling expired products, wrapped in paper littered with ads that you have to spend at least 30 seconds reading before you can make your sandwich.
Of course people would be outraged.
But many, no matter how outraged they are, will just swallow the bitter pill and stick with the Bread+ subscription (perhaps because they don't care enough yet to trigger a change in their habits, perhaps because they have other priorities and battles to fight), hoping that the next change to the T&C won't make it even worse.
And some will instead start looking for alternatives.
Would it make sense for a professional baker who's been in the business for decades to tell those folks "just bake your own f*cking bread" - and then complain that not enough are moving out of the Bread+ walled garden?
Or perhaps would it make more sense for that baker to volunteer for a competitive price to sell their bread to its friends, family and local community?
We all know that running your own stuff on your own machines is the best way to avoid enshittification. Just like wisely selecting and mixing your wheat and butter to bake your bread and cakes is the best way to make those products the way you like them. But not everyone will do it, nor they are supposed to do it.
People live different lives, have different priorities and choose different battles. Any pragmatic human must at some point delegate some tasks - that's how modern societies were born. We don't judge those outside of our area of competencies for not being able or willing to perform a certain task, no matter how trivial that looks to us.
An average neighbourhood has someone good enough at baking that they can sell their products to their local community.
And nowadays perhaps it also has someone good enough with computers that they can probably run on an old laptop or unused VPS stuff like a small Matrix server, a GoToSocial instance, a Nextcloud instance or an Immich server.
And they could probably serve that to small local groups of 10-20 people for something like $10/month (and at low volumes those services usually don't even require much maintenance).
It can be $100/200 month that can abundantly cover the cost of a small VPS, let alone the cost of running a miniPC at home.
It'd be a bargain for the subscribers too - nowadays for $10/month you don't even get a Netflix subscription, let alone a complete cloud alternative with no trackers and no ads.
It can even be a reliable source of income for IT folks in areas that would otherwise not provide other viable employment solutions.
In a healthy society with a high level of immunity against enshittification, your local self-hoster should probably become the digital equivalent of your local baker or your local pub.
#smalltech #techneighbourhoods #selfhosting
