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Once upon a time, FOSS enthusiasts were so concerned about Microsoft, that they recommended everyone use GMail and Google Apps.

Today the same crowd hates Google, so they recommend $SERVICE instead...

As long as $SERVICE is a provider in the cloud, on somebody else's computer, I'm shaking my head.

Many of the things being recommended are even more proprietary and locked-down than Google's stuff is!

Fighting monopolies is good. But don't lie to yourself that this helps software freedom.

@HerraBRE @chuck Good callout on the contradictory statements those people made. 100% agree this is fucked up but...Look I'm going to be honest, you will not get the majority of the population to self-host. There are a ton of concerns regarding people with low income or people with no computer education. Hell, you won't even get good penetration outside of us computer geeks until this process is one-click install.

I support these efforts. But we have to compromise on the remote hosting thing because people with lower incomes are never going to be able to afford such a luxury. GMail and other "gratis" services are a tax on the poor. If the problem is hosting on a remote computer, the solution to that isn't to tacitly imply the poor buy something (a local computer for hosting). The solution to expensive HTTPS certs was Let's Encrypt! Let's think about complete penetration if we're serious about privacy, rather than remaining pure. This will require compromise on some principles of privacy, namely we will need solutions based in trust and humanity rather than a tech solution.

BjarniBjarniBjarni 🙊 🇮🇸 🍏

@alice @chuck I like the way you're thinking!

Minor counterpoint: computers are free! These days even the poorest have smartphones, which are extremely capable machines.

When we don't want to compromise on privacy, we do have the choice to compromise on other things, such as uptime or speed.

Check out apps like Briar, they're doing some amazing things.

My was built to let people run websites on devices without public IPs.

So yes, but... don't rule out the tech side completely.

@HerraBRE @chuck That's absolutely fair! And mobile device software are indeed often one-click setups. We could potentially get people acclimated to the idea of using their phones or tablets as passive MX servers and other oft-remote services. That's what I mean by a humanity-based solution: changing hearts and minds by using cultural normalization (of self-hosting MX, etc) and building that trust in these services. I think it's even better nowadays since most phones are encrypted, so people may even begin to trust their own devices more than remote ones if we appeal to them in that fashion. We have the tech, let's get those people!