[rfleury]

Whether or not you call what I'm doing self-hosting or not is not really the issue. I am not really interested in fighting over that term - you may be right that I misused it. If so, I apologize for the confusion. Instead, I am interested in real, practical steps that increase individual control over property - which includes code - and decrease the ability of centralized organizations (corporations, governments) to freely exploit that work, thus increasing individual liberty and the freedom to compute.

I agree that Digital Ocean, Substack, and so on still operate as "chokepoints", and that I'd be more hardcore if I really went full-on setting up my own physical machine and my own totally open source web stack. Unfortunately, all of the software in that space is depressingly terrible - surely partly because of the mess that is the web - and it entirely lacks a good user experience, which is a very good argument in favor of these centralized services. For that reason, I've instead favored such centralized services, which is unfortunate but more practical for me, because I am a moron when it comes to running servers.

In my mind, the vision of fully decentralized self-hosting computing will simply never happen as long as this unfortunate technical situation remains - at some point, someone is going to have to really sit down and iron out all of the details in a way that doesn't absolutely suck shit. Like I mentioned in the article, Caddy and Gitea have done a fairly good job at the first few steps, but the tech and generally the whole process is still pretty idiotic, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have to be.