Against Outsourcing of Sites and E-mail
4 days from now my blog turns 20. It predates the time WordPress was easy to install. A week ago I had the chance to speak with the head of catalyst2 - the webhost I moved to more than 20 years ago and have stayed with since then (that's where my blog started, too). He thanked me for the kind words. He and his colleagues dealt with my Web sites and my E-mail (later my wife's E-mail too) for more than 2 decades. They're awesome (I'm not paid to write this!).
I've long been told that running your own E-mail server is hard and getting harder over time (for reasons beyond the scope of this post, but there is certainly consolidation and concentration of power going on). I never tried, except on the Web servers where some software is meant to relay E-mail to the administrator (though that's quite different because E-mail is mostly outwards with such setups). My wife keeps telling me about companies and people who refuse to accept that her surname is in her E-mail suffix (the misogynistic serial harasser refuses to even accept the surname she has had for nearly 12 years) and instead demand that the E-mail should be with Microsoft (Hotmail/Outlook), Apple (some "i" clown), or Google (GMail). They would not even accept GMX addresses (GMX.co.uk is apparently less British than GAFAM!).
Self-hosting, which is a subset of self-determination, ought to be the norm, not some edgy edge-case. That does not mean that people should host everything from their home and start their own personal ISP (for neutrality at the Net layer, too). One good start would be for everyone to register a domain and use that for blogging, E-mail etc. I did this a very long time ago and now my E-mail domain has about 20 addresses (created for different purposes; it is a sorting mechanism, sort of like a pigeonhole).
Looking back at 20 years of blogging, and doing so in my own domain, I can say I enjoyed many freedoms. Unlike Social Control Media (where accounts are lost forever when sites shut down, e.g. Identi.ca, Digg.com, pleroma.site, mastodon.technology, gnusocial.de, joindiaspora.com*), everything I ever wrote stays intact and accessible in the same addresses... as 20 years ago.
Social Control Media is volatile garbage. Like smoking, "DO NOT EVEN START!"
If you can stop now, then stop now. At least try.
Software Freedom is great, but it is not enough if you let someone else do it 'for you'. Their interest in your personal freedom, when it boils down to simple economics, is lessened every year because they move on in their lives and have more urgent needs/priorities than keeping old things online (just for preservation's sake). Groklaw let ibiblio manage the site and we know how that ended up. The site is still accessible at http://groklawstatic.ibiblio.org/, but https://www.groklaw.net is essentially dead. All links to Groklaw are therefore, in effect, dead links. █
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* Over a million things I wrote in those sites are lost for eternity.