So I saw the back and forth about "just host it yourself" and that being inadequate for most people, and i have thoughts about that where I agree with the statement but feel it stops short, and so I'm breaking this out into my own post because i don't really want to be in anyone's replies specifically and give them the feeling they have to craft a response, but it's something I feel I want to say nevertheless. I would agree that "just host it yourself" is not an appropriate blanket response to everyone. Only a handful of us sickos have the drive or wherewithal to support those kinds of services or networks. Fedi, email, password manager, chat, workspace, whatever whatever whatever. But this also skips over the part where there's those of us who do and can, and critically are more than happy to share our knowledge and resources and services and work with those who are in need. Narrowing to an example of social media: "Wow this corporation that runs this really doesn't have my best interest at heart" is a common realization we're having collectively over the past decade and that pace seems to be accelerating. But so often the follow-up thought is "I wish there was a platform being run by a group of people who didn't have profiteering off ethnic cleansing as their business strategy? Wouldn't it be nice if there was an entity that hosted a social media service that wasn't aiming to extract value from its users and didn't do things to support and platform fascist cultural supremacists? Of course! And as it happens we're talking over it! And most of you reading this don't host your own fedi instance, you're freely using a service provided by a passionate individual or small team. And there's options anywhere from someone running a service off their rooted phone in their bedroom to someone on hosted infra with strong backups and staff redundancy and a well-defined data policy. Broadening this out, you could throw a stone and probably hit half a dozen people who already host the thing you're looking to piggyback off of and would be happy to share. I used fedi as an example here because we're really close to that as you read this right now, but that's true also for video sharing, for streaming, for blogging, for personal storage, and so on. There's tons of community built on existing nodes. You don't have to do it all yourself, and where you can then contribute to the strength of the community is in offer back of whatever skills, services, time, perspective, presence, anything that you can offer to further diversify and support the network. Sure, you might not be prepared to be a sysadmin, but I'm not prepared to be an artist or musician. I'm a community provider, but I'm not a community organizer. I have a finite amount of time on my hands and as such, a finite skillset. Being able to provide this community space and the services I do has put me in contact and connection and community with so many amazing people who are good at the things i'm not, who are passionate about the things i can't fit into my singular self, and they make me better. And the space I support has been able to bring other other people who benefit from the same connections or new ones. So while i agree that "just host it" isn't the answer, stopping there in hopes of finding a winning substitution puts too much burden on the service and individual to also be the endpoint, where truly you have to broaden your perspective. It's the connections we form here with real people and the community that we exist in that provides us with the robustness to fill those gaps. From each according to ability, to each according to needs.