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For background, the author of this post wrote Manyverse, one of the most popular mobile SSB clients. Implicit in this post, but never explicitly mentioned, is that people "not wanting to run servers" is actually mostly a side effect of poor design -- because running servers is for "technical people" who can put up with high cognitive load and lots of sharp edges, we don't design our server software to be easy to set up & free from unnecessary gotchas, and so we end up unnecessarily competing with other high-cognitive-load tasks these folks would like to do -- and the alternative is to make something like Manyverse, which is a client-server but that is no more complex to use than any other social media app unless you want to dig deeper. (Similarly, "most people will never be able to / want to learn to code" makes a lot more sense in the context of a language like java, where most of the code a beginner must read & write is boilerplate with complex & dubious justifications, than in a language like python where for simple tasks there's a very close connection between the intended behavior & every piece of the implementation. Frontloading necessary learning attracts lore nerds & people who want to boast about their leet skillz, but scares off people who would like to just get something done -- so the more theory is necessary to use some particular stack, the more its user base fills up with ineffectual theory-wankers. This is a problem when theory has a dramatic benefit, but there's no good excuse for, ex., the stupid amount of manual configuration necessary to deploy a new apache -- where the "theory" rarely generalizes beyond the specifics of apache's own internals, & under most circumstances, reasonable defaults could easily be supplied or guessed.) "Most people will never want to run servers" is, much like "most people will never want to own their own computers", mostly a statement about antihuman design tendencies & the way that particular groups have insulated themselves from them. People don't want their own computers so long as they take up an entire building and require dedicated air conditioning and card punches, and people don't want to run their own servers so long as deploying a new server involves dealing with IANA, NATs, port forwarding, DNS propagation, poking holes in firewalls, and other hassles. But a lot of people used to run napster off their PCs, and a lot of people still run bittorrent, despite all p2p software essentially being 'server software'. |