Those who use free software vastly underestimate the addiction to convenience of those who don’t. When I’ve tried to entice people into using some of the FreedomBox apps, they’ve usually just laughed. To my face. And these are my friends and family. So my short answer is no, I haven’t been very successful.
Until people come to recognize the threat to freedom posed by pervasive surveillance, adoption of self-hosted services may best be furthered by striving to provide timely, effective solutions to specific group-oriented use cases. A freedom and privacy advocate in the group may be able to influence the choice of a self-hosted home for the group rather than a “free” social media platform tied into the surveillance economy. However, this can work only if a credible and practical self-hosted solution exists.
The convenience of a consistent UI is very nice, but it’s not a feature of the current free software ecosystem, which is decentralized and largely depends on the volunteer contributions of individuals and small teams. In contrast, the surveillance monopolists, with their centralized control and deep pockets, have achieved a higher degree of convenience through a relentless effort to eliminate any friction that would impede user data from flowing to them to be monetized.
Convenience is great, it’s just not the highest value. As much as most people dislike the creepiness of targeted advertising, they don’t (yet) perceive pervasive surveillance as a threat to their freedom. Given the relative inconvenience of free software, which is less a technical issue than a cultural one, I don’t see mainstream users willingly adopting self-hosted services based on free software as long as convenience remains at the top of their hierarchy of values in selecting which services to use.
That’s not to say that FreedomBox and self-hosting in general are doomed to irrelevance. Although I’m not sure FreedomBox can achieve the original vision of a home appliance as easy to use as, say, a toaster, it might achieve parity with consumer-grade routers, whose admin functions, to the extent they’re ever used after initial setup by an ISP technician, are likely exercised by a tech-savvy friend or relative rather than by the actual owner. Consideration of who will be self-hosting and how is relevant because the adoption of self-hosted services by mainstream users depends on the availability of self-hosted services.
Aside from convenience, the principal barriers to adopting self-hosted services are inertia, which I would describe as a sort of natural laziness (i.e., “an object at rest remains at rest”), and switching costs, the price paid in effort, loss of data, and loss of contact with others, involved in moving from one service to another. The surveillance-based social media platforms maximize switching costs to keep their users captive.
Mainstream users might use self-hosted services to participate in groups where their motivation to participate exceeds their inertia and any switching costs involved. I’m thinking of book groups, neighborhood associations, schools, fan clubs, sports clubs, and similar groups. Particularly if there’s a member of the group who can advocate for a self-hosted solution, perhaps even providing the self-hosting themselves, then the group may avoid sliding by default into setting up on a major social media platform. If a self-hosted solution can establish a beachhead, users will, perhaps grudgingly, begin to use it. They’ll then be in a position to discover other self-hosted services.
The success of this approach depends in part on chance and opportunity. It was unfortunate there was no well-established self-hosted alternative to Zoom at the start of the Covid pandemic. The key is that a solution, or at least an easily followed recipe for a solution, exist when an opportunity to establish a self-hosted community presents itself.
That brings me back to concerns around supporting self-hosting, but with a focus on driving user adoption. In addition to continuing to improve the stability and reliability of FreedomBox as a platform for applications (e.g., backup/restore), attention would need to be given to use cases, testimonials, and tutorials. Use cases to identify and fill gaps in functionality, particularly gaps that affect multiple use cases (e.g., a Discourse-like app, a mailing list manager); testimonials because the example of someone who has successfully done what you’re considering doing is a powerful motivator; tutorials on both self-hosting setup and use of services, perhaps aligned to use cases, because services may need to be configured differently depending on the use case, and because the UI quirks of various services that might otherwise exhaust the patience of the convenience addicted can be mitigated by a demonstration of how to overcome, work around, or endure them. The attention to use cases could extend beyond written recipes to follow to include creation of templates and scripts that could be used to simplify setup for specific use cases.