Turnkey systems are a special case, because they specifically hide the configuration knobs that otherwise might be twiddled by even ordinary users (and thus keep the landscape from being a monoculture).
This idea that you have to hide everything a user isn't expected to need to understand until they prove they already understand it, which seems to have originated with the Mac, is stupid & gets in the way of gradual & natural mastery. Systems that present configurability while having reasonable default behavior invite users to explore them at their own pace, and inevitably lead to ostensibly "non-technical" users gaining whatever specific technical knowledge and skill benefits them directly. Even if they end up making a misconfig, a million random misconfigs is very different (in vulnerability terms) from a single unfixable configuration hole deployed to a million black boxes.
In both these cases, there's an entry level that people can get into without much skill, effort, or risk. (Running an email server, of course, is not part of the entry level: email is heavily gatekept.)
Most people who upload videos to youtube are going to have less than ten views total on those videos, which is fine, because why should they maximize views on a crappy phone video of their cat or something? Likewise, you can run lighttpd with little to no configuration in order to make some directory available, & nobody's likely to attack it even if it happens to be vulnerable, simply because most people are not hosting anything valuable enough to be worth exploiting.
The ideas we have of running a youtube channel or running a server are both affected by the hypervisible minority of highly polished professional versions: when we think of youtube videos, we're more likely to think of Hank Green than x_greenfan77_x, and when we think of web services, we're more likely to think of Facebook than we are to think of that python script we dashed off in ten minutes that's been working unobtrusively for eight years. The difference is that running a server has a mostly unearned reputation for a higher minimum technical skill involved: everybody knows that you can record a youtube video with no makeup & shitty lighting and sound, because everybody has seen amateur youtube videos, but not everybody knows that their torrent client is a server.
For background, the author of this post wrote Manyverse, one of the most popular mobile SSB clients.
Implicit in this post, but never explicitly mentioned, is that people "not wanting to run servers" is actually mostly a side effect of poor design -- because running servers is for "technical people" who can put up with high cognitive load and lots of sharp edges, we don't design our server software to be easy to set up & free from unnecessary gotchas, and so we end up unnecessarily competing with other high-cognitive-load tasks these folks would like to do -- and the alternative is to make something like Manyverse, which is a client-server but that is no more complex to use than any other social media app unless you want to dig deeper.
(Similarly, "most people will never be able to / want to learn to code" makes a lot more sense in the context of a language like java, where most of the code a beginner must read & write is boilerplate with complex & dubious justifications, than in a language like python where for simple tasks there's a very close connection between the intended behavior & every piece of the implementation. Frontloading necessary learning attracts lore nerds & people who want to boast about their leet skillz, but scares off people who would like to just get something done -- so the more theory is necessary to use some particular stack, the more its user base fills up with ineffectual theory-wankers. This is a problem when theory has a dramatic benefit, but there's no good excuse for, ex., the stupid amount of manual configuration necessary to deploy a new apache -- where the "theory" rarely generalizes beyond the specifics of apache's own internals, & under most circumstances, reasonable defaults could easily be supplied or guessed.)
"Most people will never want to run servers" is, much like "most people will never want to own their own computers", mostly a statement about antihuman design tendencies & the way that particular groups have insulated themselves from them. People don't want their own computers so long as they take up an entire building and require dedicated air conditioning and card punches, and people don't want to run their own servers so long as deploying a new server involves dealing with IANA, NATs, port forwarding, DNS propagation, poking holes in firewalls, and other hassles. But a lot of people used to run napster off their PCs, and a lot of people still run bittorrent, despite all p2p software essentially being 'server software'.
There's no site, so I don't know how this is related? SSB is a peer to peer protocol, and (aside from the UIs of most desktop implementations being electron) doesn't use webtech.
I suppose people use SSB mainly for social network, so each "site" can be the wall of the users, with posts and comments submitted by the users or their friends.
But you're right, SSB is more broad as a generic p2p message protocol (and zeronet is a generic p2p site protocol)
SSB is a store and forward network, so this is sort of built in. Basically, you only see posts that are within a configurable number of hops in the follow graph, and if you block somebody then you don't replicate any of their posts to your followers, so if everybody you follow has somebody blocked then you'll never see their stuff even if they are followed by somebody one hop further out.
(Default hops is 3, and most people use 3, so functionally this doesn't matter much. But if it was 5 or something, this would matter a lot. It's also sort of why people recommend unfollowing pubs once you've built up a network you trust -- because pubs will connect to anybody who requests it, so even users with no redeeming qualities who no human being would choose to follow, like dedicate griefer accounts, will end up being replicated by a pub.)
You know, this was really supposed to be a survey for his mailing list subscribers. He never said explicitly not to share it around, but posting it to orange website is a great way to flood him with low-quality submissions.
Perhaps. It seems awfully counterproductive though, even so.
Other fields (even ones that benefit from or effectively require in-person guidance -- like mathematics, or martial arts) have books aimed at more advanced practitioners. Theoretically, some writing advice books are aimed at more advanced practitioners.
This essay was spawned by my experience reading a book that was literally intended as the textbook for an undergraduate creative writing workshop (i.e., a class for juniors and seniors who are english majors with a focus in creative writing). Surely twenty-five year olds who have already spent three years dedicated to the craft of creative writing are in the same position as their peers who have majored in mathematics, and do not need to be assigned the english equivalent of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Calculus".
I've read a number of other writing guides, only one of which was aimed at folks who did not self-identify as writers, and they all had at least one chapter on navigating ego hangups -- even the ones called things like "Creating Engaging Character Arcs" and "Promoting Audiobooks on Kindle" that you'd expect to be highly technical and specifically aimed at professionals.
Writing is powerful and involves a lot of responsibility. Torturing yourself does not necessarily improve your ability to wield this tool responsibly.
> Good writing often contains some piece of the author's soul and that's always a risk to take.
Ego risk or reputational risk should not be treated the same way as risk to others. It's also easy to avoid.
Very few writers are so monumentally important that the world would mourn for them having never published -- and most of those who would have been were, of course, never published. My advice to people is that if writing feels like self-harm, you're better off not doing it & the world probably won't notice. Folks who have something so important to say (or who are so desperate to say anything at all) that they ignore my advice have made their choice :)
Torturing yourself does not necessarily improve your ability to wield this tool responsibly.
A lot of my writing grows out of the fact that my life is torture. Writing helps make it less torturous but it doesn't come without risks.
It is rather arrogant and likely comes from a place of privilege to presume that people who find writing torment are in a place to chose to not be tormented. Not everyone has some nice, cushy life where they can decide between "Get X job or write" and choose X job because it comfortably pays the bills without being emotional torment for them.
It doesn't have to change the world for it to be monumentally important for that specific writer. Their torment is no less real just because most of the world didn't care about their personal struggles in the face of monumental personal problems, even if solving their own problems only solves it for them and for no one else.
This idea that you have to hide everything a user isn't expected to need to understand until they prove they already understand it, which seems to have originated with the Mac, is stupid & gets in the way of gradual & natural mastery. Systems that present configurability while having reasonable default behavior invite users to explore them at their own pace, and inevitably lead to ostensibly "non-technical" users gaining whatever specific technical knowledge and skill benefits them directly. Even if they end up making a misconfig, a million random misconfigs is very different (in vulnerability terms) from a single unfixable configuration hole deployed to a million black boxes.