The Future Is Not Self-Hosted

Drew makes a lot of good points in this piece regarding self-hosting. In a way, we see sprinkles of this when public universities keep e-mail infrastructure for those who are alumni. In a way, even looking at the postal office and its ability to support "virtual" mailboxes, allowing folks to operate public proxies to store information. The point Drew makes about libraries being critical in this aspect of infrastructure building is important too: public libraries are designed to provide us with the basis of this. It would require more funding from the state to make it an actuality in a few places:

• Libraries to operate as local data centers, optimized around local power demands and made more efficient, versus our current approach of data farms the size of cities that require equivalent means of cooling and powering.
• Each state to provide an ISP to allow folks to pick between the commercial offerings and what's available in the private sector. This isn't difficult in theory; we have this today with broadcast television, although this is losing its backbone of funding.
• A public specification for durable computing and storage that one can use for holding this. This is probably the "extra" part of this but having a specification for the baseline of "home compute" can help people build with reference hardware and equalize the playing field for access. This can allow folks to borrow equipment to host but keep the actual storage of data to themselves by means of portable storage (like a USB drive)

Hazel wrote a thread on Bluesky that I agreed with - in some parts. The subsitence farming model worked - to a degree - in places that are allowed to exist communally. The closest form of that that we can get to today would be via policy that does some of the things I'm thinking about above (or in some form that enables people to allow themselves a hybrid network setup).

This conversation is great because it's not one in isolation. There's a hope amongst Black archivists to help build out a means of connecting one another that can be almost as resilient as the ways we've always kept our stories and experiences alive. Conventionally, this was kept by way of oration: we'll tell our stories to one another, pass it down with song, imagery and the like and that'd be part of our archival traditions. Instagram and Facebook have upsurped this for my generation and the need of us to return (or introduce) a system that honors the people who contribute to it is one we need to look to investing in.