> you have a system administration problem, whether you want or not
Right. You can pay people to do things for you, or you can do them yourself, but either way the things have to be done, and they should be done by someone who is good at it and has a contract with you -- employment or otherwise.
One has to be able to start somewhere. How do you "get good at it" ? You proceed via steps. you challenge yourself, you reach an improvement, enjoy that improvement for a while, then you challenge yourself again when you see room for improvement.
But just saying "nah let somebody else do that" is not what we want here. We're hobbyist, we want and enjoy doing stuff ourselves. Doing a sub-optimal work is okay, we will improve over time :)
sharing our experiences and procedures here is part of that
This is true to a point. But eventually, you've gotten all you can from learning and managing a new thing. You can't reasonably make it more efficient and there are no benefits to spending more time learning it. This is when it shifts from a hobbyist's exploration to a routine, mundane task that requires time and attention while offering no _new_ benefit.
For some hobbyists there's comfort in this repetition; for others, it's just a time sink with high opportunity cost.
There is a middleground, imo. The way apps are designed massively impacts the general requirements of system administration.
What we're seeing is largely centralized applications and the work it takes to manage them. Ignore UX for a second, and imagine you wrote a database on top of a distributed system - ala IPFS - and all modifications were effectively pushed into IPFS. This suddenly boils the system administration tasks down to:
1. make sure my IPFS node is up to date
2. make sure my computer is online
And even those can be heavily mitigated with peers who follow each other.
Now we're not there yet, i'm not advertising a better solution. I'm simply saying that part of the administration is a heavy lift simply because of how these apps were written. I think we can do better for the home user.
Secure Scuttlebutt is a lot easier to maintain, for example. The most important thing with that is that you simply connect to the internet and publish your posts/fetch other posts. In doing so, other people make backups for you and you of them. Backing up your key seems like the highest priority.. and even that could be eliminated i imagine, in the P2P model at least. Very low maintenance.
>You can pay people to do things for you, or you can do them yourself, but either way the things have to be done
Nah. I had an elaborate home setup for a while as a hobby and the ongoing hassles (including NextCloud upgrade complexities) just led me to turning it all off and making do with simpler or no solutions.
I’ve learned my lesson about mixing hobbyist tinkering with something your family comes to expect as an everyday convenience - that while you on a random Saturday morning might be hyped about deploying the latest self hosted cool stuff, the other you on some random Thursday at 10pm when everything malfunctions is gonna hate past-you’s guts for putting you in this position.
> You can pay people to do things for you, or you can do them yourself,
or be a parent of a geek and have it done, with 24/7/365 support and training, and remote support of some magical things like "hey! I had a button appearing and I pressed it and now I am not sure I have internet anymore". Of course said "customer" has no idea about what was on the button. Etc. etc.
Right. You can pay people to do things for you, or you can do them yourself, but either way the things have to be done, and they should be done by someone who is good at it and has a contract with you -- employment or otherwise.