On self-hosting being a patch
It was an interesting read and I recommend anyone interested in tech decentralization and regulation to check it out, but two thoughts came to mind:
First, perhaps most of the blame is in the concept of “self-hosting” itself. It is too narrow for what it really represents. Something described as self-hosted can most of the times not only be individually-hosted but community-hosted. You can host it yourself and bear all the associated burdens alone, yes, but the way the article portrays this as the only possibility is a bit of a straw man. “Self-hosting” also implies open-source software that you could run for a whole community, a town, a city, a country or a continent if you will.
It implies that not only the software’s source is available and its license is a free software license, but that it is designed in a way that you should be able to run it to its full capacity yourself. How large that scale will be, how many people are running it, and how it gets funded and managed can take multiple forms and, if regulation is to be the answer, that is one possible structure (government) that can fund such projects, though it doesn’t have to be.
The second thought is that regulation and self-hosting are not opposed to each other. In fact, they are not at odds at all. So to point to regulation as the better solution and self-hosting as a limited one may pose the illusion that we have to choose – we miss that they actually are far more effective together. That is, unless your goal is just to reform the big-technology-corporation-owns-everything model. For that, regulation alone is much better, with all the long-winded bureaucracy, ceremony and always-open possibility of a reversal.
