Yesterday, @kelbot said:
"Can't help but think the move here is making tech for ourselves and paying ourselves to do it. Like, funding each other directly to make stuff we need and want and cutting these tech A-holes out of the picture entirely."
https://retro.social/@kelbot/109724101437284214
and I have been thinking about it ever since.
I'm going to try and discuss that today.
This has some overlap with the recent tech layoffs. It's not about that, but it's related to that, and I am calling that out for people who might want to get some distance from having been laid off before engaging.
Let's start with the vision:
I want to live my life outside the rule of megacorps and rent seekers.
I want to excise Extractive Economics and Surveillance Capitalism from my life.
I want to build a community that can sustain, that can keep it's money circulating within the community. A community that is built around the idea of enriching one another.
That's hard!
It is hard, but it's at the root of most of the things I do.
We grow food! Not enough for a whole community, obviously, I'm not a full time farmer. But enough to supplement for our neighbors.
We make pottery! Dishes, bowls, plates, cups, etc. Again, not enough for a whole community (right now) but enough that we're exporting pottery and bringing additional income in to our community.
We're making toys. Same basic deal as above. We don't make enough toys, or good enough toys, or a large enough variety of toys, to completely replace all external toy purchases for every kid in our community, but you can bet your ass that between the vintage and antique toys we restore and resell and the new toys we produce that there are some kids in town with just absolutely bonkers playtime.
We print and publish books. We get paper, usually, from a local supplier. We write zines and comics and we use those things to drive traffic away from corporate shit and towards local businesses.
We record music, we host shows, we press records and dub tapes and run a radio station.
We make TV. We do this both to reduce the mindshare of media produced by mega corporations and to extract ourselves from their pool of advertising. (I've talked about this since at least 2015, I won't rehash the whole argument here. Ask the duck for ajroach42 DIY Media.)
I work with an electronics recycler to get useful computers off the path to the landfill, and back up and running with FOSS, in to the hands of community members who can make use of it.
And, of course, we run Mastodon, Peertube, Nextcloud, Element/Matrix, etc. As a community, we contribute to open source software projects (financially and technically) and we run infrastructure.
And none of that is enough!
When I say "None of that is enough!" I don't mean that we should be doing more, exactly.
I mean that there should be more of us, to start with.
I mean that we should aim higher.
But I also mean that we need to pull more money in to this community in order for it to sustain.
We have to treat ourselves like a separate economy, and focus on what we can sell to the world (export, extract from them) versus what we have to buy from the world (import, extract from us) versus what we can keep circulating within our community.
Anyway, that gets us to the ground level, so we can start talking about tech.
When I say "None of that is enough!" I don't mean that we should be doing more, exactly.
I mean that there should be more of us, to start with.
I mean that we should aim higher.
But I also mean that we need to pull more money in to this community in order for it to sustain.
We have to treat ourselves like a separate economy, and focus on what we can sell to the world (export, extract from them) versus what we have to buy from the world (import, extract from us) versus what we can keep circulating within our community.
Anyway, that gets us to the ground level, so we can start talking about tech.
"Web infrastructure" can mean a million different things and I mean a couple of different things when I say it. I'll start at the bottom.
We could run an ISP in this community and are actively considering and exploring that.
I don't really want to run an ISP, but if we did run an ISP that would be money we were recirculating within the community, people we're employing within the community, etc.
I think an ISP is a level bellow where I want to start, but it's not outside the realm of technical possibility and that's worth noting.
I think we want to start with web hosting.
Small servers (SBCs, probably Rock-pro or similar) 10G fiber connections, the basement of an old farmhouse.
We wouldn't have 5 9s, but we'd have at least one 9. We wouldn't have the juice to host the next Youtube, but our peertube servers are doing just fine, etc. etc. etc.
I've been working in and around datacenters for 16 years, some of the other folks involved in this were running Dial Up ISPs off t1 lines at a time when that made sense. I'm confident that not only could we start a DC, but that we could make it both sustainable and maybe even profitable, while also, you know, not hating ourselves.
(Of course, as has already been pointed out, eventually we will have to connect to the larger internet which means dealing with major ISPs and telcos, if not outright dealing with MS and Amazon. This is a fact of doing business in the modern era, and is unavoidable right now. But also, if you don't see a difference between that and using AWS or GCP... I don't know what to tell you)
Now, I'm only about 3/4 serious when I talk about running my own datacenter.
Maybe in another year or two, but that stuff's hard and we'd have to find transit and build redundant circuits and do a bunch of other difficult things that I'm not *really* ready to do.
But there are things that we can do right now, within existing infrastructure.
We have community software.
The microblogging fediverse (Mastodon, Hometown, Goto Social, and lots of others), the photo sharing fediverse (pixelfed), and the video sharing fediverse (peertube.)
We have forums, we have podcast hosting platforms, we have email providers, we have search platforms, we have a huge list of services that we could provide to small communities.
Many of them struggle when you scale them, but Scale is a Trap
Human Scale Technology by JKriss on Medium
We can, and should host small software for small communities.
"Self Hosting" as much as I advocate for it, can be wasteful. It's the libertarian approach. The "Opt Out" approach. The "I got mine, go screw" approach.
We should not expect everyone to self host, both because the technical burden to do so is somewhat high, and because the time investment to do so is somewhat high.
But four people who do not individually have the time and expertise to install, maintain, and moderate a thing can frequently manage it together.
Up to this point, I've engaged with this kind of infrastructure from the perspective that I would pay for it out of my own pocket, and do the work to keep it up, for myself and whomever else chose to participate in it.
But that leaves me on the hook for most of the support and maintenance. I pull double or triple duty as an SRE, a DC tech, an ops goblin, moderator, and a support tech.
I don't mind that, but some more help would be nice.
I also end up spending a bit of money with external hosting providers (although, in my case, mostly based in Bulgaria, rather than AWS/GCP/ETC) and that's money that leaves my community, which I don't love.
And I end up providing the things I build for free, which is fine because I am able to do that today.
What I do, and how I pay for it, is fine!
But doing all the work myself and paying for it out of my own pocket is not sustainable in the event of seismic economic turmoil.
And, hey what do you know, it looks like seismic economic turmoil is just around the riverbend.
How can we, as a community of technical and non-technical people, of media producers and media consumers, of artists and writers, of game designers and developers, of People, how can we build and maintain software for one another in a way that is not Extractive.
How can we help soften the landing for people who were recently laid off?
How can we turn this idea of community software and community infrastructure in to something that can help People survive economic disaster?
This feels kind of like "How do I make money from the fediverse" but that's not what I'm trying to get at here.
This is more "How can we build a model for the web that isn't dependent on exploitation or the good will of strangers?"
And yeah, somewhere in there a key idea is going to be "Don't lose money on hosting stuff" but it absolutely has to extend beyond that.
How can we get beyond working for free?
How can we get beyond living precariously?
Sieze the Means was published on 2023-01-21