(source: lori @ hackers.town)

I've seen plenty of people talk about their social media being basically essential to them. Either to their work, their lives, whatever. This was a big deal when Twitter started falling apart, but I need Twitter to promote my work/talk to my userbase/etc.

And yet, when you came from Twitter to Fedi, your choice was...to join a public instance.

If that instance has problems, you're in the same boat of my livelihood is at risk!

If your social media is absolutely vital to what you do, you need to self host. It's not just small time people either, there's massive companies out there that have their entire customer service tied into Twitter. Companies who only put out customer announcements on Twitter. You cannot put your livelihood into someone else's hands here if this internet presence is important to what you do.

What if my instance gets shut down! What if I get banned?

These aren't arguments for fedi having problems in how it works, these are arguments for you to self host. You can't put the whims of a random stranger to you on your business. You need your own website, and you need your own self hosted instance.

But that's so hard!

I didn't say it was easy! It should be easier than it is! But this is the only way you can actually protect your own data. That's been true of every site, Twitter could ban you at any time, Tumblr could ban you at any time, the only way that you can actually own your data is to own it, for real, and that means putting in the work, or living with the consequences if you don't.

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(source: lori @ hackers.town)

This came up with my other recent post about Cohost/social media sites being unsustainable. I said that the only thing that is sustainable is sites run on the scale of a hobbyist budget, because they don't make money.

A lot of people said but running websites is too hard for most people.

You're right, it is! That has absolutely no bearing on the fact that it's the only thing that works. We should try to make it easier, but it's the only thing that works whether it's easy or not.

The same goes for this post. Self hosting is too hard? Having your own website is too hard? Might very well be, but it's the only way to actually control your online presence. And if your online presence is vital to what you do and how you live, then that's what you have to do, or you have to live with the downsides of not doing so. But instance owners have the right to stop hosting a website when they want, and as long as that's true you have to manage your data yourself if those facts are concerning to you.

(source: lori @ hackers.town)

Because of, well, the world right now, I've made several posts about social media lately.

I've posted about how the only way to own your data and not be at the whims of someone else removing your data or taking your content offline is to self host.

I've posted about how social media isn't profitable and isn't financially sustainable and the only thing that will last at this point is self hosting, running small communities at a hobbyist scale, etc.

And I've gotten a lot of replies like I need corporate social media to do my job, self hosting is too hard for most people, most people don't know how to make their own website, I can't grow an audience on my own website

Folks, I need you to understand, I am not saying this is the easiest option. I'm not saying this is what you should want to do, this will make your job easier, this is the best way to build a following.

I'm saying that the landscape of the internet is changing, the social platforms that have been running on unlimited VC funding at a loss for years are running out of time. I'm saying that this is the only sustainable thing and that this is what it'll have to be. If it's hard? If it's bad for your business? If a lot of people won't be able to engage with this new landscape? Fuckin...tough titty! It doesn't matter if it's hard, it's what's happening!

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(source: lori @ hackers.town)

And yeah, it means we need to make it easier! It shouldn't be hard for someone to spin up a mastodon instance, it shouldn't be hard to make a website, it sure as hell shouldn't be the nearly impossible task it is now to set up an email server.

But the overly centralized internet isn't sustainable, so those are the problems we need to solve. You can't bank on Twitter or Instagram or TikTok supporting your business until you retire, or your local Mastodon instance run off a computer in someone's closet paid for by occasional donations. You can either hop from service to service, or you can own your data and self host, but you can't rely on these platforms to just be there for you forever.

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(source: lori @ hackers.town)

Will this suck for a lot of people? Sure it will!

Does that factor into whether or not it'll happen anyway? No!

It's like saying we shouldn't have a hurricane because some people don't have water stocked up and some people's houses are right by the beach and they will get hurt or die. That doesn't matter to the hurricane.

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(source: lori @ hackers.town)

And then it's like people saying but stocking up on flashlights and candles and water and canned goods is expensive, how can you ask me to do that?

Because you don't choose whether the storm is coming. You can prepare or not, that's up to you, but it doesn't affect the outcome of whether the storm happens.

god. i just. /gestures wildly at everything lori is saying
i've been saying this for years now as well, though lori has articulated her viewpoints a lot better than i could ever manage. and everything she's saying is true and has always been true but especially so now that we're starting to see these "too big to fail" social media outlets actually start to fail. especially as everyone just flees one large corporate platform for another thinking things will be different here, surely this massive centralized corporate social media platform that's bleeding millions upon millions of dollars every single month will be around Forever; the force of our will can surely carry this website into being online indefinitely.

i just. /sigh.
i don't know how to make people see this isn't sustainable, i don't know if there even is a way to make people understand, especially people so young they can't conceptualize the web past how it is now. before i deleted my tumblr account entirely multiple "big-name" blogs i followed with follower counts in the hundreds of thousands were purged by staff either without reason or with a very flimsy reason, and their blogs purged irrecoverably, only for these same people to just remake anew on the same damn platform they say ruined their livelihood.

i just don't understand how people do that... maybe i'm just old enough to have grown up not only with the old web but old enough to have watched many, many websites with a massive userbase come and go, old enough to remember AltaVista and GeoCities and MySpace and... and... sigh. too many to even count. and we even see this within these large companies that are still around now as Google axes project after useful project many people used and loved.
and i don't even want to say it's purely the fault of the common user; it really isn't. everyone else is just as much a victim of the modern corporate hellweb as i am. i just wish people would see the gravity of all this, and am endlessly frustrated they don't and feel helpless to make people understand. like you don't even have to stop using tumblr or facebook, but don't make that your only livelihood. don't put all your eggs in one basket. even if you can't afford a webhost like the one i have, make a neocities or geocities.ws or. something.

and i'm afraid that people will have to lose everything over and over again before they even start to listen, because webdev and web design is hard, it's a skill you have to build and understandably people balk at and don't want to or even just can't for whatever reason work on the skills you'd need to have your own webspace. it sucks. i wish there were better answers for them. but lori's right in that it doesn't change the nature of reality, either.
sometimes the choices are all just ass.
and i guess for myself i need to learn better to let people go to their ruin if it pleases them. oh well.

(source: triviallytrue @ tumblr.com)

It's important to be obnoxious about the free open source software you use because large tech companies have advertising budgets and the random devs who make cool shit don't

Basically this but for FOSS

yeah. finally someone else who gets it, haha.
this is absolutely and 100% why i am, simultaneously, incredibly annoying about being a Krita user and will also stab you to death the moment you even breathe the words "Photoshop" or "Procreate" in my presence.

(source: spacelazarwolf @ tumblr.com)

it literally just boils down to do you want things to be better or do you want to lash out at people you perceive as your oppressor. it fucking sucks but sometimes in order to move toward liberation you have to do things that aren’t fair. you have to treat some asshole with respect and sit down and talk to him because as annoying and exhausting as that conversation may be for you in the moment, having more allies on our side is extremely important in the long run. we cannot dismantle the patriarchy without cishet men on board. let go of this internet i don’t owe my oppressor education mindset and actually engage with people. you don’t have to put yourself in harm’s way to do so. you’re not stupid. you can deduce for yourself when it’s safe to engage and when it’s not. but we need to stop hiding behind these weird internet mantras like i don’t owe my oppressors anything and i shouldn’t have to educate you because that gets us nowhere. we have to do things that aren’t fair if we want things to change.

this post is near the end of a larger discussion chain that i find very interesting; i only cut this part out specifically because i wanted to talk about this one post and am very tired, so i don't really have the energy to render the full post chain when this one post is the one i want to focus on. (the whole chain is very good and about how young men are pushed out of and denied mental health services; please click the link to the original post for the full context if you're interested.)

but yeah. i feel like i realized this independently at some point years ago, so it's both interesting to see people continuing to talk about it and also just completely exhausting with regard to so many things in my life, both recent and long past.
it's an unfortunate truth, and i've had people throw this in my face before, that how will they learn if they aren't educated, how will they know to do better. and it's like i do want people who don't know why things are harmful to have them explained, i do want people to understand. but i am also just one person and so very tired, and i don't have even the slightest bit of energy left to spare on people i don't think will actually consider what i'm saying at all. as much as i'd like every person to be asking things in good faith or even just pure curiosity rather than a malicious attempt to get me to expose weakness, i can't do that and it's frankly unsafe to do so. i imagine the vast majority of marginalized people are in a similar place to that.
the world as i'm aware of it is becoming more fascist and hostile to people like me, not less. it's incredibly ignorant to think humanity simply passively moves towards more understanding and acceptance as if every scrap of innovation and acceptance of the Other wasn't fought for tooth and nail and often times set back many decades by hatred and violence. and i would love to help move people towards understanding at least the small amount of things i do understand in the world so we can keep moving forward, but i'm already doing all i can in that regard.

and i don't think people who've never had their humanity really laid out bare as something you have to talk gently to someone about how you do actually have worth as a person lest they heft the full weight of their power over you against you at once. realize how completely fucking exhausting it is to do and how quickly it drains your will to live. that the necessity of having to do this at least sometimes because not everyone is a willingly and deliberately hateful bigot, but the necessity doesn't change how tiring it is either.
it's usually thankless, too, and you have to be alright with that as well.

(and to be clear, i am in full agreement with the tumblr post being quoted in my post here, it just also makes me contemplate and then lament the tiring effort of doing the things spacelazarwolf talks about. i have done them before and will again, i just wish it wasn't necessary as well.)

i didn't really intend for this to be so long, but i guess i'm just still so tired of people and life and how cruel everything in the world often is. enjoying pride month has been pretty difficult for me, and i did want to enjoy it but often life has other plans and you don't get to really choose whether you deal with something or not, it's just going to happen anyway. i don't have any hope for this year being good, i just want to make it through everything.

(source: twocubes @ tumblr.com)

people want doing the right thing to be like pulling the correct lever at the correct time but actually usually doing the right thing is more like holding a moderate weight at arm's length continuously for seventeen years

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(source: palominocorn @ tumblr.com)

It's like holding a weight continuously and then at chaotic intervals suddenly having to juggle it and two more weights of different sizesBut yeahPeople looooove believing that doing the right thing is an occasional thingThat they can Do the Right Thing a few times a month and that makes them Good PeopleAnd then the rest of the time they just do what's easier (which is usually not the right thing)Then they get mad when you point out they're jerks/selfish/slobs/hypocrites/etc