Mastodawn

One of the common misnomers around the migration away from toxic tech stacks is that the options are either 1) services managed by a company or 2) everyone #selfhosting themselves.

There is however an often overlooked 3rd option of community-scaled infrastructure. Here a group identifies their needs, plans & deploys to meet them. Much like a community garden, that infrastructure has people skilled & dedicated to its upkeep in providing for that group, working bees & skillshare as needed.

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Alison Chaiken Feb 27

@JulianOliver We shouldn't forget intermediates between self-hosting and megacorps. Mastodon is an obvious example: I'm not hosting this instance. (Thanks @Larvitz ). [email protected] is run by a non-profit foundation. @nextcloud comes quickly to mind. It's for-profit, but it has user-friendly principles. A similar description applies to @openstreetmap and Bandcamp.

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Julian Oliver

@alison @Larvitz @nextcloud @openstreetmap Yes it is good such ethical and managed services exist. They can meet many needs and we (Nīkau) often recommend various providers in this space.

There are many needs they can not meet however, like those of frontline activism, organisations with stricter privacy requirements or those needing more scalability and flexibility as they grow. It is for such cases that we offer training and do server deployments.