Alex Hyett

Technology Gatekeepers, Self-Hosting and Work

I have been thinking a lot about self-hosting again recently as more and more companies seem to value profits over honesty and integrity. I am not sure if this is due to the current economic climate causing shareholders to demanding more from their investments or something else, but I don't like where the world is heading at the moment.

In the last few weeks it was revealed that Reddit plans to sell their user data to a Google for $60 million a year. Naturally the owner of WordPress and Tumblr thought this was a great idea and plans to do the same with all the blog posts users have written over the years.

All big platforms seem to go through this same process:

  1. They make a product that everyone loves, usually for free and attract a massive user base.
  2. They find out that massive platforms cost money to operate, so they start trying to generate revenue either through adverts or premium features.
  3. The product starts to shift more towards monetisation rather than user experience, usually with an increase in the number of ads and sponsored content.
  4. The product finally shifts, so the sole focus is monetisation above all else including users trust, privacy and satisfaction. This is usually where the platform starts losing users and never recovers.

This has already started happening with Twitter with many prominent people leaving the platform since Elon Musk took over. Luckily many alternatives have popped up in response and people are now fleeing to either Threads, Bluesky or Mastodon.

I personally have settled on Mastodon which I am hosting myself with the help of Masto.host. Bluesky and Threads seem like good alternatives too at the moment but given their main goal is to make profit it will only be a matter of time before they go the same way as Twitter.

The good thing though is that Threads is planning on supporting ActivityPub soon which is the federation technology behind Mastodon and the Fediverse. With the help of Bridgy Fed there is going to interaction between Bluesky and Mastodon as well.

I am hoping by the end of this year that it won't matter whether you are on Mastodon, Threads or Bluesky we will all be able to connect.

I have quite a few things on my self-host list now that I have finished my course:

The other apps I plan to self-host privately such as SearXNG for search, Omnivore to replace Readwise and Nextcloud to replace Dropbox.

As you know, I also migrated from Substack to Ghost in January, but it didn't go quite as I had planned. The original plan was to have all content on my main website instead of on a different subdomain. Ghost however does not work well as a headless email platform, so I will likely move to Buttondown in the next few months.

Technology Gatekeepers #

Ghost and Buttondown both rely on Mailgun to send out emails. Technically you could host your own email server quite easily but if you actually wanted to use it to send out emails, especially in bulk, it would get blocked as soon as you send out your first newsletter.

Email is no longer truly decentralised as many rely on a few big mail servers run by the likes of Gmail, Microsoft or Yahoo. If your email server is blocked by one of those then a large proportion of your emails won't reach their destination.

It got me thinking about other technologies where a few gatekeepers prevent new players from ever starting.

Payments is an obvious one. There are only a handful of payments companies that actually manage their own payments with the card schemes with the notable ones being Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, WorldPay and Checkout.

Other popular card processing companies such as Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad and Patreon are all just using one or a combination of the above companies to process payments for them.

If you want to sell something on the internet there is currently no alternative but to go through one of these companies in one way or another.

Cryptocurrency was supposed to be a viable alternative and maybe one day it will, but currently it is still tainted with the taste of scam NFT projects, theft and fraud. Maybe stable coins are the answer, but it is going to be a long time before we have a cash equivalent for the internet.

The same can be seen with the current AI gold rush. Given the vast amount of computing power it takes to train an AI model again it will be the large companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google who will dominate in this space. Even fairly small AI models generally require a powerful graphics card to produce anything worthwhile in a short amount of time.

If you haven't seen the videos produced by OpenAI Sora yet go have a look. They are impressive and if the price is right I can see these replacing a lot of stock video footage in the near future.

I am sure they have cherry-picked the best ones to show off but even so, if the time to generate isn't that long I can see people using them a lot. This sort of generation is definitely beyond what most people would be able to generate at home on most graphics cards, even if there was an open source equivalent available.

Work and centralised tech #

Where you find technology monopolies, you usually find high profits as well. Thanks to the boom in AI and the demand in graphics cards NVIDIA is now one of the most valuable companies in the world.

NVIDIA is now worth $939.3 billion and which is more than Facebook and Tesla. Out of the big tech companies it now sits just behind Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon. OpenAI is also worth $80 billion, and I am sure that will rise even more once Sora is made public.

For software engineers, these are also some of the highest paying companies, and if money is your only goal then they can seem like quite attractive places to work for. However, despite the high profits, they are not immune to mass lay-offs as we have seen over the last year.

It is not that they can't afford to keep the staff, they are just looking for ways to cut costs. The benefit of being in high demand means that there will always be more young recruits eager to join to replace those that you have kicked out.

Something to keep in mind when applying for your next job.

❤️ Picks of the Week #

🛠 Tool - boringproxy - I wanted to share a service that I have running on my server with a family member without having to use port forwarding to do it. Cloudflare tunnels is one option but some services such as video services are against there TOS. Boringproxy is a great open-source alternative that just works.

🛠 Tool - pql - I have been using piping language a lot with Azure logs recently, and it is quite simple for querying especially if you don't know SQL. This open-source package converts piping language to SQL.

📝 Article - Have we forgotten how to build ethical things for the web? - At the moment it seems like every company is trying to sell your data to train AI. We know this isn't ethical, but it doesn't seem to stop companies from doing it. There are no answers here, but I wonder if there is something as developers we can do to push for more ethical practices.

📝 Article - JavaScript Bloat in 2024 - It is amazing how much JavaScript is needed for websites to work these days. This is even for websites that are mostly static. Slack for example needs 55 MB worth of JavaScript to work. Even Medium which could be a static site needs 3 MB.

📝 Article - I Was a Teenage Webmaster - I am sure I am not the only one here that had their own website as teenager in the late-90s and early-00s. I can relate to a lot of this. I think a lot of us would like a web where we aren't invaded by privacy pop-ups everywhere we turn.

📝 Article - How To Center a Div - It is a running joke whether you can center a DIV or not, but it can be such a pain at times. Josh has put a great interactive article together of the mains ways to do this.

📝 Article - The one thing necessary: Home Assistant: Three years later - I have yet to go down the home assistant rabbit hole yet but this was an interesting read and makes me want to try it.

🛠 Tool - GitHub - quickemu-project/quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux desktop virtual machines. - If you use virtual machines often this looks like it could be useful.

📝 Article - The Cost of Code - This was quite a long but interesting red in the cost code and how developing software has changed over the years.

👨‍💻 Latest from me #

I have big plans for next few months now that I have a bit more time on my hands after the release of my course:

💬 Quote of the Week #

We’re heading towards an era of greater decentralization on all fronts – geopolitics, finance, education, journalism, and energy are just a few examples – driven by technologies including, but not limited to, the internet. This newly decentralized era will require new infrastructure and organizing principles that can adapt to the chaos and complexity inherent in decentralized systems.

From Packy McCormick's essay on Decentralisation.

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