On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 7:30 PM John Lines wrote: > I have been thinking about how to offer alternatives to Facebook, WhatsApp, > Zoom etc for non-technical people, many of whom are finding the Internet and > computers much more central to their lives than they did before the pandemic.
This idea reminds me of Sandstorm, which aims to be a platform for making it easy for non-technical folks to deploy and run web applications. Nextcloud also comes to mind. https://sandstorm.io/ https://nextcloud.com/ My main concern is who will be the sysadmins for such hosting (both the physical machines and the operating system etc) and how will they be motivated to continue doing that for the lifetime of the group? A volunteer will eventually get bored and wander off at a critical moment, leading to security problems, data loss or complete loss of the service. Most groups won't have the money to hire a sysadmin. There aren't many sustainable SaaS businesses that provide sysadmin services by offering hosted FLOSS web applications at a price. Those that do exist are mostly focussed around a limited number of projects. Perhaps eventually AWS could do something like this, but they seem to mainly be focussed on providing infrastructure to technical folks rather than to consumers. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
