Thank you for the warm welcome. You are getting to the heart of what I see as one of the challenges to the growth of the #fediverse. Open Source apps are great for those who can host their own - but that somewhat limits adoption. Single-instance deployments are, by definition, not highly-available. Single administrator instances cannot be highly-available. My goal is to start with folks I know to see how many are willing to contribute to the overall costs. Can I offset the cost of hosting? Are people willing to trade the value of their PII which is being taken and leveraged by corporate social media for actual currency to have a service that is reliable, easy to use, and grows with their needs.

I've joined fediverse instances in the past that - even in light of very well intentioned admins - were not reliable and where the performance was so bad that the site was not attractive for use because I couldn't do what I wanted to do without terrible response times and / or error messages coming back.

fiscal constraints are everywhere and I'm hoping to find a model that provides a meaningful service to folks who do not want to learn about DNS, postfix, dovecot, linux, DMARC, security, PKI and the list goes on... Since most folks have no idea the long list of details that must be respected to provide a reliable and secure service AND they also do not realize how much 'big tech' knows about us as individuals / how much money they make trading in the details of our lives to serve up advertisements... I wonder how many will be able to contribute at a level that will be meaningful.

My goal is to start small and to not grow beyond what I can reliably support. If I find that folks are willing to offset costs and if I find others who are willing to tag-team the administration then we might be able to (as a community) grow to the point that fediverse apps become popular among the mainstream (if that is a desirable thing? IDK...) but it won't happen if we can't find a way that the software and access to the service are not barriers to adoption.

Sorry this is a very long answer to a simple question. I'm sure I'm not the first to have considered these things. I'm not deep enough into the fediverse culture to know where these concerns are discussed and resources and options are shared to know how many others might be looking to provide a service that may be commercial in the sense that it requires some form of payment or subscription but doesn't steal the value of individual identities.

I am very interested in any connections you could facilitate. Given that I am retired and didn't budget for an on-going expense in this area I can't pull this off on my own 😀 I am very interested in working with others to see what we might accomplish together.

@Ken Gahagan Don’t sweat a long reply, I find we Friendica using folks are far more interested in long form conversations haha! You’ll fit right in.

In terms of hosting and such I enjoy following @Elena Rossini ⁂ (that’s her Masto but she’s also trying out a Friendica soon). She’s someone going at it from a beginner flow and it is informative to see how long/which steps she’s gone through learning to host from complete scratch. Many Fedi guides are focused on end user members and not as much on aspiring admins, so I think it’s valuable to see and share the hosting journey because surely one of us will be clever enough to simplify that process for end users (she’s using yunohost which is a step closer).

I think admin mentorship/continued simplification will be key, and I think possible too. Cuz remember back in the day when nothing was SaaS and each individual had to install software and there was no GeekSquad? This is kinda bumping into the growing pains of that same era. But it’s possible! Because enough ppl did those manual installs for the general population to go first “what’s the internet” followed a time later by “I want that too that (insert neat thing here) is cool”. Keep building innovating and iterating 🥳

This last bit is more philosophical which is: I’ve come to believe that it’s negligent, unhealthy, and cruel of us to just not bother understanding how tech works under the hood. We crave uptime and max network effect, but it wasn’t until I had some datacenter and SaaS friends that I realized wow these are grueling jobs keeping these massive resource heavy digital operations afloat. Remember the brief pangs of ethical qualms people had over “Nike shoe sweat shops”? People give zero thought to what it takes to run 24/7 services holding millions of people. I guess people think “internet” = high pay, or that “computers” = not real because you can’t see it. But running this stuff in a centralized manner brings real harms to those who do it. Like do ppl think the social barons wanted to become Bond Villains? (Ok bad analogy, some did, but I digress…) it takes massive resources to keep it up and to hold everybody’s activity. Every time humans do one thing at critical scale, it’s always unwieldy, and that always results in exploitation to try and keep it working. Billions of people all doing the same thing from a single point of failure is destined to enshitify. Social, internet, monocrops of food, personal cars causing traffic jams, electricity coming from a single transmission line from a single type of energy source, the list goes on. When a billion people are concentrated together in one spot doing the exact same thing, it’s not manageable. Spreading out is what works. But in this case that’s gonna require us to take some personal responsibility and learn his stuff works OR help others to.

It’s like Fire. Imagine there were no safety PSA. That no local fire departments were going around teaching kids fire safety or checking on senior’s smoke alarms. Nobody knew how fire worked AT ALL. Like they couldn’t even see it or know when they were being burned by it. And that’s what we’ve done with tech. Each of us plays with fire and never learns even any basic fire safety like how to not leave a candle burning or how not to put out a grease fire or how to use a fire extinguisher. That’s kinda what we need is lots of ppl trained on how to use fire extinguishers. Yes, learning to operate a fire truck and use its equipment is a specialized skill (a hosting service). But holy smokes is it expensive to operate fire trucks!! So someone needs to keep doing the work of figuring out how to right side and distribute easy to use fire extinguishers and teach lots of ppl to use them (small scale and self fedi hosting). And some of us lay people are gonna have to step up and learn how to be volunteer fire fighters until that happens.

If I think of any other good folks to follow I’ll let you know, and you’re welcome to follow me! About 90% of the time I’m talking about fediverse newbie stuff and opportunities to try and make fire extinguishers so to speak lol