House Panther May 28

#onpremisesinfrastructure is vastly underrated. What are you going to do when #GoogleWorkspace or #Microsoft365 shut your account down because their AI decides to and you have no recourse. You can’t sue them because you’ve agreed to their terms of service. Oops? 🤷‍♂️

Also, what many don’t know is even if data is stored in the cloud, the customer is still responsible for backing up and archiving their data. The cloud company does some rudimentary disaster recovery but has specific indemnification against data loss. Marketing conveniently glosses over this. 😈

The #cloud cannot be trusted for small businesses. #Selfhosting is the way to go. It’s not hard at all and I am in the midst of writing a book for people with a minimal technical background to get started as easily as possible. Or even for them to have a technical friend help them out.

Show threadTomáš ZnamenáčekMay 29
@housepanther @bert_hubert Agree completely except for the bit that says self-hosting is not hard at all. For many smaller organisations it’s very hard indeed, that’s why they go with Workspace or MS365. And it’s often not a question of reading a book or finding a friend to help you set things up. They are just FAR below the needed levels of digital maturity to run things themselves. (I work for a non-profit that’s trying to improve digital skills in the Czech public sector including NGOs.)
Show threadbert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦May 29
@zoul @housepanther tbh I had missed the rest of the post (beyond the click for more). Self-hosting right now is indeed not easy. But we can ask how that came to be. And if it could be solved, and I am sure it could be. Much like you can make your own coffee because we made that as easy as you'd want it to be, so you don't have to go to a coffee place.
Show threadBruno Girin

@bert_hubert @zoul @housepanther YunoHost is a step in the right direction. That said, I think we need multiple solutions:
- for individuals and non technical people
- for SMEs with no technical people on staff
- for SMEs with at least 1 technical person on staff

Some hosting providers could also play a role by offering off the shelf solutions for popular use cases.

At present, I feel there's a gap between VPS and full suite that does everything a la M365.

May 29 at 10:56amWeb
Show threadblathoudMay 29

@brunogirin @bert_hubert @zoul @housepanther

Thanks for listing the use cases. They seem to cover a significant part of the target.

Two very different things are needed :
- Technical solutions that can be used by such populations
- A documentation that is understandable by them, and up-to-date.

For the first part, there are already systems that are quite "light" on arcane operations and have a manageable "learning curve".
On the second part, it's more complicated... Writing documentation for non- or not-very-technical readers is rather difficult as it requires to know which assumptions we rely on when we are more technically savvy.
And once the first document is out, it's pretty cumbersome to keep it up to date as the technical solution evolves.
I see a community based approach as being the most likely to be sustainable for a documentation effort. We would have a "forgejo" (or equivalent) repository with the docs and people could freely submit changes to keep up with updates and software evolutions.
This said, as the target is rather non-technical, there has to be also an accessible documentation on how to participate in the documentation effort :)

There could be documentation on how to self-host, but also how to use some basic tools in a secure and safe way.