Hey y’all,

So I keep having this intrusive though that I SO BADLY want to get my anti slop, anti corporate brainwash friends off of fb and start our own social area (with blow and hookers. Actually forget the blow).

My issues: most of them aren’t tech savvy and my setup would have to be solid with little issues. I never post on fb but I basically would Make 1 post inviting everyone to it.

I have a couple synology nas setups. Neither are open to the internet. I have some spare computers as well that could run the server fine.

I know I could potentially just make a server from one of the public instances of matrix but I don’t trust that and it’d be a nightmare if that one went down or something and we had to move again.

Realistically I’d probably get like 10 people to join me. Just a place for local community to hang out and share events etc.

I keep getting stuck on how exactly to go about it. Like I think I’d need tailscale and docker (still dont get what docker really is). I have used tailscale briefly on mobile and it seems to work. But idk. I would also be fine paying a modest sum a year for some pro to host it if that is smarter…

  • LewdLemon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    49·
    17 hours ago

    Your end goal, friend, is noble, and I don’t mean to discourage you or gatekeep. And yet I must strongly advise you to slow your horses before you squander what I’d call your “social capital”, i.e. the willingness of the people close to you to follow your recommendations and try out new things. If they find their user experience greatly lagging behind what they’re used to, not only will they return to the services they were using prior to your suggestion: they will also be less likely to listen to you in the future and meet alternatives with skepticism, if not hostility. (“I’ve tried it and all this other stuff doesn’t work…”)

    Thus, you need to make sure that they have an excellent first experience with whatever you throw their way. As a tinkerer, tech enthusiast, privacy advocate, or whatever you want to call yourself, you’re likely willing to accept a great amount of jankiness, pain, and lack of feature parity because you feel you get something more valuable in return. But that is not how most people use computers. Most people do not care about privacy, digital independence or any of the things you may cherish; they want things to “just work”.

    And, to put it brutally bluntly (sorry!),

    Like I think I’d need tailscale and docker (still dont get what docker really is)

    this part alone tells me your solution is unlikely to “just work” for them. These are some basic skills to have if you want to try and compete with a billion-Dollar company and the convenience it provides to your friends.

    So, my advice is this: don’t aim for “perfect”, aim for “better”. And basically anything is better than using FB Messenger, Whatsapp, Discord or whatever they may be using. Either go for one of the large public Matrix nodes (Matrix.org is unlikely to go down any time soon…) or move your comms to Signal messenger. Both may not be fully under your control (Signal is centralised, and Matrix nodes might be closed or defederated), but they’re e2ee and so professionally managed that your friends might actually enjoy them, use them on a day-to-day basis, and even pull other people over. That way, you’re also building social capital, so that once you’ve obtained the skill to run your own and get it to the level of polish it needs to have, they’ll be willing to follow you there too.

    (If this posting sounds like I’ve learnt this the hard way, that’s because I have. Things are fine now, though: almost my entire social graph is reachable via Signal, and I’m preparing to self-host my own comms.)