For services only I depend on, I have production-only. Since I can only inflict damage on myself, and can often work around problems.
For the XMPP server my friends and family also depend on, I have a dedicated nonprod VPS. My services are driven by ansible playbooks, so I’ll tweak the playbook with whatever change I want to make works in nonprod, before running the same playbook against prod.
Whenever there’s a new Debian Stable release, I’ll rebuild the servers completely, to try and prevent “drift” between the nonprod and prod versions (not that I change things often enough for this to become a big problem). This is also the big test of my backups, which so far haven’t been needed in a “real” emergency 🤞
Completely agree with this! The big opportunities to get mindshare will come completely out of the blue, and likely as a result of massive blunders on Adobe’s side.
We never know when the blunders will come, we just have to be ready and provide the next best user experience so that the free software is the “obvious” place to switch to.
As we saw from the twitter/reddit migrations, the fediverse did get a large amount of traction, but bluesky became the obvious alternative because its UI was basically the same.
And that’s fine - the fediverse is it’s own thing and many people (myself included) don’t want “adoption at all costs” - but I think it’s worth pointing out that it does hinder adoption in these big moments.
I have a lot of respect for free software projects that deliberately replicate the UI of an existing proprietary project. They make it so easy to recommend for people to switch when those moments come.
What I have seen is that once people get a taste of free software that really easily solves their problem, it makes the benefits “real” to them and they start to look for other alternatives on their own.