Sustainable solutions for self-hosting

Speaker: Ravi Dwivedi

Track: Systems administration, automation and orchestration

Type: Short talk (20 minutes)

It is a nontechnical talk and aimed at a general audience.

The main ideas I will present are: why self hosting is required, individual vs collective self hosting, collective self hosting and collective control over Free Software projects can give people outside the technical community a way to modify the software, a freedom granted by Free/Libre Software but usually available only to developers or big companies.

Self-hosting has become an attractive idea for people who like control of services and their data into their own hands. It also helps us challenge big tech and their monopolies on respective parts of internet. But self-hosting consumes time and resources, and requires a lot of skill. Privacy is a fundamental right and should be easily exercised by anyone. Individual self-hosting will only allow people with knowledge, skill and time to gain privacy and control over the services they use.

In this talk, I will introduce ideas for sustainable self-hosting. I will make a case for community based self hosted services in exchange for voluntary donations as much more resilient than individual self-hosting. Usually the decisions by community-backed services are based on consensus, rather than one person dictating all the terms.

I will also mention prav project which is an attempt to run an XMPP based chat service by a cooperative society in India, and plans to be funded directly by the users. This way the prav app can be modified by nontechnical people as they are also included in the decision-making.