Hacker News Reader

Comment by prox | Hacker News Reader

It is about expendable time. I mean it might take you a few hours or so do it, or even less.

People working in other sectors, maybe with a family when they come home, do not have that skill or luxury.

And speaking from experience, documentation is often greatly lacking. For example just today I had to thumb down a couple of google docs because it was riddled with inconsistencies and lacking crucial information. And that’s a company with near infinite money. And its like that for most software, with great docs an exception rather than a rule.

View on HN

I don't agree with you, only for the fact that right now, in this age computers are everywhere, everything is digital, it is not luxury to learn how things work, it's survival, it's not expendable time, it's professional time

You could say the same thing about any number of fundamental disciplines: “chemistry is survival,” “roof making is survival” “SQL is survival.” The truth is, there’s only so much time, and we each must specialize. Software that decreases the need for broad reaching high-specialization is a public good, and software that increases the need for specialized knowledge across all economic activity is hurting productivity, whatever the bean counters may say.

I have various friends who have made similar statements about food (everyone should cook meals for themselves), cars (everyone should do their own basic repairs and maintenance), homes (everyone should do their own basic home maintenance), keyboards (everyone should do basic soldering and learn a non-qwerty layout), accounting (everyone should have a budget and do their own taxes), gardening, fitness, investing, education, etc.

The number of people who can learn all of the skills that someone in the world considers essential is small. The number of people who can do all those things while having a job, kids, and a working partner is smaller still. The rest of us have to focus on a proper subset.

For me, every minute I waste learning how to configure my server is a minute I could have been playing Legos with my kids or riding my bike or sleeping.

You know, I have kids too, but I still wonder how much more dependent on big tech we might potentially get over the next decades, and how much responsibility I have in protecting and educating them in that regard. I'm postponing self-hosting mail for several years now, because it has A LOT of gotchas and requires tweaking and debugging every couple weeks/months because someone considers you a Spammer again (looking at you, Hotmail (German: Schrottmail)).

But eventually they will be old enough to require an email address, so should I just let them use Gmail and stop worrying, or try to have something up and running until then? At least protect them from the data kraken until they can make their own informed decisions about that. But then I'm not just responsible for my email, but my whole family's email. What about 30 years down the road, when they long moved out? Am I still gonna sysadmin my family's self-hosting galore when they finally have kids on their own? Is it even still possible then? At least for mail it looks like when it's growing over my head I can just sign up with some mail provider (that hopefully values privacy) and let them handle that whole BS.

It might not even be worth it anymore at some point though, if basically everyone else you communicate with via mail is on Gmail. Then Google already has all my email as well.

I think it’s here Linux devs or the selfhost ecosystem should focus itself : making the software more accessible. It’s a bit like Blender before the big UI overhaul. There were actually a sizeable group of people who were very much against it, but now we are further along and its been a great success for both newbies and experts.

An awareness campaign to go the extra mile in terms accessibility would be great (and that doesn’t mean dumbing down, the two seems to be equated sometimes)

Speaking of accessibility, there was a meeting about using a headless cms at my company, so the team involved in it presents the product, something like strapi or something like that, and I ask like "Does it support accessibility features like tts/aria? And they say like "Oh but I don't think we need accessibility for this internal tool"

But also at past companies there was never the idea that internal tools had to support accessibility features, as we give for granted that we would never hire people with some sort of disability and they are just users that stay at home, it's sad and upsetting, as a person who doesn't need any accessibility feature to operate now, I really feel sorry for others who do, and I hope that I will never need them, because like your situation with products at employers like control panels and similar is very sad

As teenagers when they realize that you (or any family member with access to the server) can look at all their emails, they will most certainly never use it for anything personal and/or move away to gmail as that would massively improve their privacy situation!

I feel the same pain as you do about being complicit in all of this and I have no ready answers.

The best I managed to do is that my family's email addresses use a custom domain I manage so I am not locked into a single webmail provider. Occasionally I have to deal with some issue or delivery delays (especially for authentication emails) but it's orders of magnitude less effort than when I made the mistake of trying to run my own mailserver.

I guess put like that, I would say that my thought about the matter were a bit bullshit and I agree with you

I wouldn't say bullshit, just a tad idealistic. Then again, I'm old, and I admire your idealism.

Being self-sufficient is a noble goal, but I think it's also helpful to be realistic about the costs in order to make the proper cost/benefit decisions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com