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I think a very important reason why people don't run their own USENET node or Gitlab instance is because it's not easy. In fact, it's the opposite of easy. It's extremely difficult in the long run. If using your own server was as easy as using an iPhone, then we would see way more people doing it.

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It will never be easy. People should understand that and take the hard part as a fun part or as a price to pay for their digital independence.

That's not true. There's no reason why hosting a server should be hard. This is a UX issue, and an eminently solvable one at that. Imagine a self-hosted, easy-to-install Heroku-style server platform with a public repository for application images.

It's not hard because it needs to be hard; it's hard because no one has invested the time and money to make it easy.

It’s hard the same reason I can’t put a ton of solar panels on my roof and pump large amounts of electricity into the grid. The upstream infrastructure is not sized appropriately. It’s not that running a server is hard but that most internet infrastructure is designed to consume and not produce.

It doesn't matter how much you invest in making it easier. It will never be as easy as doing nothing, which is what the competing alternative provides.

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