The answer to the #dotcons isn’t everyone becoming a sysadmin

“Just self-host it” is blinded techie advice that ignores reality, most people don’t want to spend their lives patching servers, managing certificates and worrying about whether they accidentally opened a security hole.

But the alternative doesn’t have to be handing everything to a commercial platform. There is a third path: community self-hosting. And this is actually how much of the #Fediverse has worked for the last decade. A local group, cooperative, union, neighbourhood or affinity group can share the cost, skills and responsibility of running services. Not one person self-hosting for themselves.
People self-hosting together.

That gives us three broad paths:

• Commercial services – convenient, but dependent on the #dotcons.

• Individual self-hosting – independent, but a huge burden for one person.

• Community hosting – shared infrastructure, shared skills, shared responsibility and collective control.

The #Fediverse already demonstrates that the third path can work. Federation means you don’t need one giant platform containing everyone, many independently operated servers can connect through common protocols and still allow people to communicate across the network.

This is maybe a useful step back to the geekpath we started this article on – but also a way of taking the original “self-hosting” idea further, from individual self-hosting → community hosting → federation → native #P2P.

The #OMN path is to build the social infrastructure around the technology: open standards, shared services, federation and communities that can actually manage what they use. But we don’t have to stop at the federated client-server model. We can build bridges between federated ActivityPub servers and native #P2P applications. Were #ActivityPub can provide the wider public network: actors, feeds, media objects, subscriptions and moderation signals and P2P can then hold some of those objects locally and exchange them directly between trusted peers – through local replication, peer connections, DAT-style distribution or other open P2P protocols.

The important thing is the bridge, not another closed gateway, not another platform or another layer of #techchurn. An open bridge where an ActivityPub object can flow into a community P2P network, be replicated and worked on locally, then flow back into the wider federated network as an open media object.

So the architecture becomes – person → community → P2P network → federated server → wider #Fediverse …and back again. That gives us a path from the familiar federated client-server world towards something more genuinely distributed, without throwing away the social structures that already work.

The goal isn’t to turn everyone into a sysadmin, it’s to make the technology simple enough that communities can own, operate and federate their infrastructure together, while people who want more independence can move further down the #P2P path.

Community self-hosting is step one.
Federation makes it scale.
P2P adds another layer of independence.
The bridge connects them.

That’s a useful path beyond the #dotcons and towards a more resilient #openweb.

#OMN #4opens #OGB #P2P #Fediverse #ActivityPub #openweb #DAT