The people who don’t want you to run your own servers are the ones who want to run the servers.
People will happily run their own servers if it’s so simple to do that they don’t even know they’re doing it.
You want people to run their own servers? Design and build servers for individuals, not communities and let communities arise from the interconnections between those servers.
Why?
Because that’s the only way we can compete on ease of use with centralised systems. Not by mimicking their complexity but by side-stepping it. There is orders of magnitude difference in complexity between a system designed to serve just one and one designed to serve one, two, or a hundred thousand.
@aral I agree, we need to make everything a lot easier to set up , securely, and ensure the person doing so is setting things up securely.
Surely it is possible to build a raspberry Pi image that has everything built, you just insert in to pi (first time) it does the usual resize file system, asks a bunch of easy to answer questions (which you know before hand,, can write down the answers to.
Even better have a online configuration tool that sets up a config file for you, Kind of like the old XFree86 or kernel configuration tool.
