Priorities

Last weekend I installed gitea to run my own personal git repository, and this morning I deleted it all.

Ostensibly, the reason was that I was having trouble getting any of the instructions for "SSH passthrough" to work (allowing SSH access to repositories to "pass through" the host machine and into the Docker container where gitea was running). But I'd been a little sceptical of the whole thing from the beginning. I like the idea of not using a giant corporate monopoly for my public code repositories, which is why I was intrigued by the idea of running my own gitea instance. But I also ...don't really want to be responsible for that.

I'm not a system administrator by training nor by inclination. The systems I do administer are of a scope I can deal with, and/or they are for applications I'm very committed to. Sure, setting up this gemblog was a bit of a faff, but now it Just Works, and I understand more or less how the pieces fit together. newCardigan's CiviCRM system can be a little fragile at times, but there's plenty of documentation and a friendly community, and people with about my level of knowledge are the target group of users.

What I realised last night was that I just *didn't want to* run my own git server. And as I thought about this more today, I started to think more and more about the narrative around things like this. It's often claimed both to provide more "freedom" to host ones own services, and to be "more ethical". I think both of these are dubious claims absent of any context. I have much more freedom using GitHub than running my own Gitea. I have the freedom to not have to think about my git infrastucture, not have to worry about whether I'll be able to do the next upgrade when inevitably there is a critical security bug, not have to negotiate adding people as new users so they can log an Issue or pull request, and so on. As to ethics - Gab is hardly a "more ethical Twitter" simply because it uses open source software.

I really like learning new tech things and writing and running my own software and computer code things. But I'm not a "computer engineer". It's sometimes a tricky line to work out when I'm giving up on something because I'm having trouble understanding, and when I'm making a sensible decision to let experts manage it instead. But I think I'm getting better at it. I'd much rather learn how to create a web app with Rust and WASM to enable my friends to gempost from a phone on the couch, than spend the same amount of time troubleshooting some arcane problem with a Gitea server written in Go inside a Docker container. I've always been interested in computers and technology for what they can do to improve life for people generally. Nearly everything I've ever done with tech has been ultimately social - enabling communication, organising information for groups of people, and so on. The idea that everyone should self-host all their own tech and never trust anyone else's code has always seemed absurd to me, an anti-social right-libertarian fantasy. What I realised today is that my concern isn't that GitHub is a large monopoly. It's that it's an undemocratic corporation. Having a large group of smart people who really love making arcane things work on a highly complex systems is *great*. Just like having smart engineers who love solving the problem of how to keep high speed train travel possible and safe is also really great.

Trying to "run your own X" is always an option - I run several systems after all, including a Mastodon server for goodness sake. But I'm becoming more comfortable accepting my limits, and more importantly understanding when it's sensible to run it yourself, and when it's not. Autonomy is for *communities*. A community social media app? Sure thing. But running your own personal email server makes about as much sense as trying to build your own car from scratch. So I'll keep using corporate tech when it makes sense to leave things to a large group of nerds, and spend the time I've saved working on destroying the system that allows anonymous bosses to exploit those nerds and extract profits from the rest of us too.

Rust and WebAssembly