When this blog started, it was in the shape of a Medium page. Back in the days when I was not a FOSS activist, I didn’t pay much attention to whether the blogging platform was proprietary or not. It had some numbers (useful to feed my ego back then), and the layout was pretty attractive.
Some time after that, I started a personal journey dedicated to replacing all kinds of proprietary software with free software. I made a huge list, and one by one, I ditched dozens of apps and services in favor of free alternatives. When it came to the blog, I moved to Jekyll and started deploying it (along with other stuff like a synapse server) in a VPS.
I was feeling the power of free and open source software. I started hosting dozens of services in several VPS, I set up a homelab and started hosting even more services. It was a lot of fun, and I had to forcefully learn a lot of things. I don’t regret these times. But at the same time, maintaining all these services became very time-consuming. I was tired of my synapse server going down (for whatever reason) and being unable to communicate with my family, which wholeheartedly stopped using WhatsApp with me and followed me in my crazy adventures. I eventually shut down that server, and moved all our accounts to a public one.
This trend of moving services out of my VPS and homelab continued. I stopped having my own docker registry and started using quay.io. I removed my gitea instance and moved all my stuff to Codeberg. Some time later, I removed my forgejo actions runners and started using the ones provided by Codeberg for most of the things (everything except building docker images). Feeling very thankful of Codeberg for all the great service they provide to the community, I became a member of Codeberg e.V..
When I started the self-hosting journey, I learned that free software gives you indeed the freedom to run anything on your own terms. The one thing I realized recently is that, even if one can have all services self-hosted, it’s not efficient for the most part. It’s not efficient to have some forgejo runners idle 98% of the week because I dedicate 3 hours to actual coding. It’s not efficient to have a synapse server for less than 10 users, or have a VPS up and running to host a blog that barely nobody reads. I am confident that with my little usage, the resources I take from Codeberg are far less than the cost of running the services just for me.
This is not just about money. It is about building community. I do save some money if I can shut down a server because Codeberg’s covers my needs now. But more importantly, because I now depend on Codeberg, I do care about Codeberg, it’s resilience, and its future. I feel their pain when AI crawlers try to bring the service down. I value the efforts of the team keeping it up and running. I celebrate every forgejo upgrade, and value forgejo as a project much more than I did before.
The community-based way is also more approachable. To some extent, I have the skills to operate a server, build and deploy my docker images, and debug when something goes wrong. But this barrier is pretty high. If we want more people to use free software, we cannot depend on them being able to do all of this. But building and supporting a platform that lowers the barriers so it’s easier to have a website (like this one), to have a FOSS mail service, or to have private chat conversations is what will ultimately make free software (as a service) adoption skyrocket.