> I know people that spend thousands of dollars a year on upkeep and upgrades for what are essentially super seedbox homelabs
And then you end with "there just needs to be no disincentives". If anything spending thousands of dollars a year on upkeep should be a disincentive for most people. You are not most people though, since you do it voluntarily.
I'm a maniac though. I used to run my stack just fine off a raspberri pi with a USB harddrive plugged in.
Actually, before that, I used to run it off an old macbook.
Do we need it to be where everyone hosts a node? I just had this conversation with a friend yesterday actually. We were in disagreement about the accessibility of self hosting and federation. He was of the opinion that we should push LLMs to where anyone can type "I want to host a video hosting platform" and chatgpt.exe will find and install jellyfin on their computer and set up a cloudflare tunnel, or whatever.
I'm more of the opinion that we should increase the quality of documentation until the one person just weird and nerdy enough out of a group of 20 will be able to deploy things on leftover hardware, and share with their friends.
In terms of accessibility I don't think it would be bad per se if chatgpt.exe would be able to help you with that. Though both of us know that there is maintenance involved and once something catch fire (which will happen at some point), you are kind of helpless.
Something like pikapods.com certainly helps with accessibility, even if it isn't self-hosting per se.
But all of that doesn't have little to do with incentives or disincentives. Even with very high accessibility there are disincentives to self-host. It will cost time and money in some way. For some people the intrinsic motivation will override those disincentives. But I think for the majority of people there will still not be enough motivation to do it.
Well yes, because right now society disincentivizes people from ever spending their time from anything that doesn't earn them at least a little bit of money. Kind of to my earlier point that "FOSS" projects with a monetization angle dicincentivizes people to contribute their time, to make someone else money. Well, except for the fact that it's almost a requirement for people in certain geographies to have FOSS commits on their portfolio, due to economic disparity. Yay free labor pool.
Should we actually leverage our technology to share the bounty of post-scarcity we could have today, don't you think people would spend more time on passion projects?
And then you end with "there just needs to be no disincentives". If anything spending thousands of dollars a year on upkeep should be a disincentive for most people. You are not most people though, since you do it voluntarily.