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 threadHouse Panther May 29

@zoul @bert_hubert Self-hosting isn't that hard. A good book explaining how just has yet to be written. 😸

By going with MS365 or Google Workspace, a lot of small businesses actually place a fair amount of trust in a mega-corporation that may or may not have its best interests in mind. My friends that ran a non-profit to help the homeless became a victim of the whims of MS365 and lost all of their data. Customer support reps basically told them to pound sand.

My friends basically needed to start over from scratch. I bought them a used OptiPlex 7060 Mid Tower with 32GB of RAM and i7 6-core processor, threw in a 24TB HD, installed Alma Linux, Nextcloud, and got them started on a fully self-hosted setup. They have automated nightly backups via Backblaze.

Show threadJonty WareingMay 29

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert Setting something up initially is rarely hard. Maintaining it is. Fixing it when your friend who helped set it up is busy / away and you're non-technical is an actual nightmare.

If your friends can't recover this system entirely from backups without any assistance, they have a ticking bomb.

And let's not even talk about email deliverability.

Show threadHouse Panther May 29
@jonty @zoul @bert_hubert Email deliverability is not as difficult as it may seem. I've not encountered this problem. When DMARC, DKIM, and SPF have been done properly, I've had self-hosted email gone to the inbox of Outlook, Yahoo, and Gmail.
Show threadJonty WareingMay 29

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert That is what everyone says until they operate a system like this when it *does* go wrong, and then you realise how absolutely screwed you are.

Yours: Someone who has done this many, many times

Show threadHouse Panther May 29
@jonty @zoul @bert_hubert I have set up a system and purposely caused a disaster and had it recovered and restored in 2 hours. That's not bad.
Show threadJonty WareingMay 29

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert Sorry, I was specifically talking about email - If your email server ends up on an RBL due to overzealous people hitting the spam report button, or you happen to be assigned an IP address that used to be on a blacklist, you are seriously screwed.

I've had this happen for personal servers, I've had it happen for massive mail operations, every time is a nightmare. I stopped running my own email server after over a decade because of an incident like this.

Show threadHouse Panther 
@jonty @zoul @bert_hubert I guess I am fortunate that my IP has not been on an RBL. Or perhaps should I say lucky? 😹
May 29 at 11:11amWeb
Show threadJonty WareingMay 29

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert It's honestly just luck, yes! Fingers crossed for you.

The whole situation is awful and I hate it - it shouldn't be this hard, but unless something changes drastically email is a broken protocol that we all rely on.

Show threadHouse Panther May 29
@jonty @zoul @bert_hubert The protocol itself isn't necessarily the problem. The underlying systems work. It's just what's been grafted on top that sucks. It's also the big guys having unfair control.
Show threadJonty WareingMay 29

@housepanther @zoul @bert_hubert The protocol was never designed to handle bad actors - everything grafted to it afterwards is an attempt to make it harder for them to operate, but all it does is raise the bar and you just get more technically capable bad actors.

Fundamentally spam is an unfixable problem in any federated system where anyone can contact anyone else cheaply without a preexisting relationship.