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Always Own Your Platform

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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Re: Always Own Your Platform

#121

Post by tcfunk »

If you ask me, we're already past the point of this being effective.

Coming from the perspective of creating and selling a PC game, do you really think you can be successful by posting it up on your website with a Stripe checkout button? (Actually you shouldn't even be using Stripe, but I digress). If you do, you're fooling yourself.

I think the same could be extended to a number of industries, e.g crafts that are sold on Pinterest/Etsy. To get back to where we were will require a complete overhaul of the entire system. Until then, we are beholden to our advertising masters.

I actually don't think it's all bad, though. 15 years ago, you didn't have nearly the options available to you to make money that you do now.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#122

Post by lxe »

Until "owning your platform" becomes as simple and as feature-full, and as valuable overall as using someone else's platform, this movement will always be akin to "the year of the Linux desktop". Always full of zeal, motivation, and good ideas, but lacking in adoption and execution.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#123

Post by bdcravens »

majewsky wrote: post #68
libria wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk about a self-defeating message. Now I get timeouts. Things you get on BigEvilHost's platform: * SEO, discoverability * ability to handle HN hug-of-death * distribution * some SRE/dev-op makes sure your article isn't 404'd * backups etc. > Avoid unnecessary middlemen. They just proved why they're necessary.

> ability to handle HN hug-of-death Seriously, this is bullshit. When my blog was on the frontpage, CPU load on my single 1-core VPS peaked at 5% and bandwidth usage was about 1 megabit per second. No Netlify, no Cloudflare, no nothing. If your website cannot handle the HN crowd, it's just badly engineered. Period. Source: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermat...

A quick check shows the site is on DreamHost which offers $2.59 a month shared hosting which isn't going to handle the load (though they have the full assortment of hosting options you'd see, up to dedicated hardware).

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#124

Post by AlchemistCamp »

jandrese wrote: post #92
saurik wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah: I honestly don't understand how people build websites that can't handle Hacker News levels of traffic... this site just isn't _that_ popular in the grand scheme of things.

The instant your website requires a database query to build the front page you're susceptible to the HN hug of death. Obviously you can build a scalable solution to handle traffic spikes, but there will always be the danger. If you're talking about an ordinary webserver giving out an ordinary webpage you will run out of bandwidth long before you overload the server.

That's a bit dramatic. I've load-tested database backed sites on $5/month DO droplets and gotten > 1k requests per second for extended tests.

My primary site not only stores articles in the DB, but runs them through an extended, custom markdown parser upon retrieval, and processes and reports event data on every page load. It was still successfully returning ~250 reqs/sec before I'd bothered implementing any caching or pre-compilation of markdown at all.

In contrast, people recently HNed[1] are reporting about 12-15k visits over a day. That's something a single server on a $5/month VPS can handle in a minute

1) https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/02/getting-hacker-news-lesso...

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#125

Post by ender7 »

Also, unavailable to most people.

Yes, I suppose it was kind of nice when the internet was only available to the tech-savvy, to those who didn't mind maintaining a second job as a Unix administrator. But for people who just wanted to _write_, it was not welcoming.

Yes, you can go to wordpress.com and sign up for your own blog, but then you're just on the wordpress platform, and subject to their whims. If your plan works, then wordpress.com becomes so big that they're the bad guys now.

Facebook, Medium, and others are here because we, the tech world, didn't give the rest of the world any other options. We didn't settle on a standard, containerized server platform that was simple enough for users to drag "Wordpress.server" onto "SomeHostingProvider.com" and get a working server. The tech ceiling was _always_ too high, and it was our own hubris that we weren't willing to build a more welcoming environment.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#126

Post by tootie »

anaphor wrote: post #82

Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) is a much more flexible idea IMO. You ultimately own your content, and it's the source of truth, but it gets automatically syndicated out and linked back to whatever proprietary or open platforms you think people will see it on. https://indieweb.org/POSSE

I remember web rings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#128

Post by bdcravens »

llao wrote: post #90
majewsky wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ability to handle HN hug-of-death Seriously, this is bullshit. When my blog was on the frontpage, CPU load on my single 1-core VPS peaked at 5% and bandwidth usage was about 1 megabit per second. No Netlify, no Cloudflare, no nothing. If your website cannot handle the HN crowd, it's just badly engineered. Period. Source: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters-aftermat...

A blog typically comes with a comment function. That's something dynamic which requires lookup in some sort of database. Your page is purely static and does not even have pagination between posts. Hosting that is trivial and nothing to boast about. Your comparison is really unfair and needlessly nasty.

If you're doing a database lookup for every page load for comments, you're doing something wrong. Also, you'll be moderating comments, unless you want your blog to become a cesspool of hatred or spam, so the page becomes even less dynamic. Myself, I'd put the comments on a separate resource so that the static page would never be affected by that load, whether POSTing or GETing, and load async. (so your static site is always up, even if your comment system falls over)
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