A heartwarming story and a call to action for self-hosters and users of independent services:
I just had a very pleasing interaction with a customer support person (Eddie) who works at a website that provides a service nationally in the small country where I live. The localness of the site is the point.
The site has recently put in place account blocking for scammers who put URLs in PMs that aren't on an allow list. As a user of a self-hosted Nextcloud, my account got blocked without warning when I shared a URL in a DM.
I contacted support, and Eddie replied to tell me I'd been blocked because of the URL in the PM, and that he'd restored my access.
I thanked him and asked him to pass on a message to the site's product managers. Here it is verbatim:
I use because it's a local, independent website. I have largely rid myself of the giants of the web, like Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon. (I won't elaborate here how problematic they are.) I want to see a decentralised web for the benefit of society - and that means using niche websites like yourselves, including self-hosted services. That means it's hard to build an "allow list" of (for example) permitted file or image hosting services, because instances like my Nextcloud server will automatically fall into the "suspicious" pile.
I appreciate the work do to block scammers. But let's try to build protections that avoid the unwanted side effect of pushing people away from independent services.
Within minutes, I got a reply to say my Nextcloud instance had been added to the allow list! Bravo Eddie!
There's so much to unpick here: Because the site isn't a giant monolith, Eddie has the autonomy to edit the allow list; he's motivated to do it because he recognises he and I have common cause; and I was polite in my interactions with him, so he was prepared to take the time to read and absorb the case I was making.
#selfhosting #nextcloud #solidarity
