Ancestors

Written by srfaudio on 2025-01-16 at 14:38

This one’s probably not gonna make me any friends, but here we go. 

So I see a lot of people in the #selfhosted community talk about not using big tech services from an ethics perspective.

The types of concerns usually fall into 2 camps:

1. Not supporting those companies financially

2. Not wanting those companies to have your data

To be clear, I fundamentally agree with these concerns. 

There’s sometimes a 3rd one: 
“Big Tech companies are inherently evil, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

This one might feel “right”, but it’s mostly false and/or idealistic. The truth is that big tech companies are capitalist entities, comprised of hundreds of thousands of people. Many of those people are bright, and care about the world around them, and are trying to do the best that they can. Many of them look on in horror as they hear their CEO’s say horrible shit. They don’t like the direction their employer is going, but they don’t have good options to leave right now. Some might be trying to make change from within to resist those policies.

Some outcomes of certain decisions by big tech CEO’s are evil. Certain CEO’s might be knowingly pursuing those outcomes. But that doesn’t mean that everyone in the company, all the way up and down, are knowingly pursuing those outcomes.

We can criticize evil outcomes, while acknowledging certain good outcomes that arise from a complex, capitalist, global organization with a mix of people, with lots of different goals, with some of them trying to do the right thing. (Example: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/27/its-critical-can-microsoft-make-good-on-its-climate-ambitions )

Even from a technical perspective, it’s largely an illusion to think that not “having anything to do with big tech” means that you actually don’t. Most of the internet is running on AWS. You don’t need an Amazon account to still be using infrastructure owned by Amazon.

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Toot

Written by srfaudio on 2025-01-16 at 14:39

The point is: reality is always frustratingly more complex than we would like it to be. We’re in a complex capitalist system, where both literally and metaphorically, there is no free lunch. I don’t want it to stay like this, and nor should you. But making changes to these systems will require messy, coordinated efforts into all sorts of ethical conundrums. And just because those conundrums exist, doesn’t meant mean we shouldn’t act.

How does this relate to #selfhosting, you ask?

Well, I think we can still address concerns 1 and 2, without falling into the intellectual trap of 3.

Many big tech companies offer free tiers. If you are hosting an #indieweb service, you probably don’t have the benefits of scale that those companies do.

Leverage those free tiers by using AES-256 encryption BEFORE it hits their servers. You keep the keys secure. The files can sit on those public storage places, and it can’t be used for any data mining, because it’s encrypted gibberish to them.

You then use what’s available to you to actually help further the indie web that we want to see. We can use those services to HELP us get away from reliance on big tech, until we can get things to a scale to stop using those services.

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