Now would be a great time for smaller hosting providers like Hetzner to offer managed services with Zulip, RocketChat, and IRC servers...
Wouldn't it be spiffy if we saw an explosion of open-source managed services to replace proprietary ones Discord, Slack, Instagram, etc.?
System administration isn't for everyone. It's a non-starter to expect everybody to manage their own open-source services. *Especially* when people are trying to disentangle themselves from multiple proprietary things at once.
Run your own blog and web site? Sure. File backup? OK. Chat server... and photo hosting ... music and video streaming... and everything else? That starts to add up and become overwhelming for most people pretty quickly.
There's an opportunity for lots of small businesses, jobs, improving open source, and setting people free of proprietary services all at once here. If we all take it. Self-hosting doesn't *have* to mean literally running services yourself, if there are reasonable alternatives. (e.g., Fastmail, Hetzner Storage Share.)
#opensource #discord