admin tax

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admin tax is all the time you spend maintaining your personal site, rather than actually using it (like to create posts). Note that the list of things considered an admin tax does not mean they are not worth doing, just that it's important to consider the time and cost associated with doing them.

Examples

Examples of admin tax:

Content related admin

removing spam
blocking spammers

Periodic required tasks

renewing your domain names
renewing https certificates
paying bills (for web hosting, domain registrars)

Database maintenance

DBA tax

Software maintenance

updating server software in general
Mastodon servers in particular: https://twitter.com/NotE0157H7/status/1347998632612491264
- "A big part of it is that you basically have to have internet poisoning to run a server/instance. It requires a fair amount of technical skill and it also requires you to have resources to pay for hosting and such." @NotE0157H7 January 9, 2021
Rails: https://twitter.com/mislav/status/1301508711005982726
- "I needed to make a small change to my hobby Rails app I was maintaining since 2009. Web development is easy, so how hard could it be?
  
  Famous last words, as it turns out. (thread)" @mislav September 3, 2020

Mental attention and labor

https://twitter.com/BeardOps/status/1101336470214733827
- "This. I wish I could care about tech less in general and infosec doubly so." @BeardOps March 1, 2019
...

Social media services

Mastodon hosting

2022-10-06 mastodon.technology Shutdown
This made me realize how little joy I’ve been getting from being an admin. How I’ve come to resent the work I have volunteered to do. I’ve donated countless hours to running the instance, solving both technical and moderation problems, and I’ve always put the instance above my own needs.
…
The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer. I’ve always been keen to learn the next new skill I need to be an effective admin. But I just don’t have it in me anymore. The monitoring that I have in place is insufficient to solve the current problems and I have zero bandwidth to invest in learning the skills to diagnose and fix the issue.

Other Examples

Personal equipment / tools but not necessarily related to a personal website:

Admin tax is a thing for videogame consoles too! 2020-09-11 Why I never play video games any more
tl;dr - because sysadminning a console is the worst game ever.

Articles

2018-09-13 Tom Morris: Quietism
- Lots of specific admintax problems listed in the post

2022-02-25 Terence Eden: What does it mean to run your own servers?
- "I used to be a member of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Flickr, etc. But I felt guilty because I didn't run my own servers. […] So I've not been able to post much on social since I started studying for a Phd in Computer Science." (NB. the cited "goat farming" analogy)