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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: January 20th, 2025

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  • the problem is getting the word out. there’s so, soooo much garbage on the internet and people rely on (usually corporate) search engines and social media to find content. and both are so chock full of ai/seo slop it’s still hard to find real information. see “adding reddit to search queries”.

    secondary problem, particularly in authoritarian regimes like the us, is that domains are not anonymous (though workarounds do exist - intermediary domain purchases, free subdomains, ipns hashes, direct ip addressing, crypto dns), and can be taken down by any corporate lawyer with a cease and desist or a fraudulent dmca notice (or at the most extreme by direct government seizure).

    hosting itself is not usually anonymous either, since ip addresses are traceable without using some combination of vpn, anonymous vps, onion routing, and ddns. none of which is trivial to set up. and the more secure the system, the more obtuse it is to access, SHARPLY limiting the target audience.

    also, running a pi is fine, but consumer hardware, software configured by inexperienced sysadmins, consumer-grade internet connections (many providers prohibit running servers), semi-reliable power grids, etc can all cause security, usability, and reliability issues that could limit adoption.

    and of course, finally, there’s the reliability and cost of journalism. anyone can say anything but how do we know it’s credible? and real journalism is hard work, of the variety most people don’t have the time or resources to do without remuneration.

    these problems are NOT insurmountable, however, and there are people and groups doing exactly this. you probably just haven’t heard about them.

    tl;dr: journalism and webhosting are both difficult and risky. some are doing it anyways.