"Host it yourself" They said!

I (someone with very limited knowledge) test the new-user friendliness of documentation of self-hosting software and share my thoughts on how difficult I find it!

Being new at something is hard, It's hard to know how much we don't know, even when we know a little bit. There's a lot of prople in the techy world yelling that we should be taking control of our data by hosting our own content, and being our own cloud services. It sounds like a big ask, but I'm up for it. The only problem is that documentation sometimes isn't sufficient for those of us that do want to get into empowering ourselves with alternatives.

I want to use my position, and lack of knowledge in attempting to self host so I can make the landscape friendlier to more new users in the space. Often people fully entrenched in a culture don't know what it's like to be new to it anymore.This results in vital information to new users being missed, and information being taken for granted, leaving people just beginning their journey to the wayside.

Follow my journey building this website on mastodon by following the hashtag!

Bio

The author of this blog is Shaughn Martel. Shaughn Martel is a queer, and trans experimental media artist, writer and sound designer currently practicing in Tkaronto, Treaty 13 of so called " Canada". Their work is primarily centered around all aspectse of technology. Their recent large project Tech Medic(2024) is a zine about DIY computer care through simple tasks to demystify the internals of computers for people opening their laptop or computer for the first time. They have a BFA at OCAD University where they were the winner of the Nora E. Vaughn Awardn in Integrated Media, a Ada Lovelace fellow for the Open Hardware Summit, and in 2022 Shaughn was awarded the James Bailey Award at New Adventures in Sound for "exemplifying an inventive and adventurous spirit and pushes the boundaries of Radio and Transmission Art. "