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Always Own Your Platform (2019)

alwaysownyourplatform.com

11–20 of 190 posts

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#11
In a perfect world, everyone would have their own servers in their homes or colos. Fiber would be cheaply avaliable everywhere, and everyone would have the know-how to manage their locally hosted services.

In truth, it's quite a lot of work to manage and maintain. Now there are say Docker Wordpress images that can be set up in ten minutes on AWS. However part of self-hosting is that there's no technical support - you're on your own if something breaks, there are updates, etc. Whereas a managed service abstracts all that away, and thus is appealing to a mainstream audience. While we at HN may like the technical side of things, many creators are uninterested in spending hours debugging a performance issue and want to write/draw/etc.

Personally I have servers in my basement and run a Matrix instance, OpenVPN, and a webserver (static site fronted by Cloudflare) as my publicly exposed services. I also have additional services like Landscape and network storage on LAN. When you run all those services, you don't just follow a guide, set it up, and leave it. While that may work for a couple months, something will break eventually and you'll have to scramble to fix it without understanding why. To do things properly and get good uptime you need to understand how things work, why they're configured that way, and have good backup and recovery practices. Security is also another factor, especially if you are storing private or confidential information.

Also for creators, there are services like Youtube and Twitch which are pretty much impossible to replicate without massive cost and infrastructure. If you're just doing text and images, then you could use a VPS or a CDN fronted homeserver and operate your own website. I'm not a vtuber, but if I was it simply wouldn't be possible for me to run my own service even though I'm interested in this stuff.

The only thing I really can recommend is to keep local copies of all your work on disk, properly backed up. Then at least if you lose access to the service, you can bootstrap again somewhere else.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#12
post #9

> Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube entice us to give them our creative work. It's time to take it back ... Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself. So, youtube, right? Where would you host your videos if you had a mind to take them back?

I would simply spend millions of dollars serving my own viral videos.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#13
post #9

> Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube entice us to give them our creative work. It's time to take it back ... Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself. So, youtube, right? Where would you host your videos if you had a mind to take them back?

> Google

Yeah, stop letting Google dictate your search results! Create your own search engine and own your platform!

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#14

Really hard for non-techies; even a hosted WordPress isn't easy to use. I've been asked a few times 'I want to write online, what do I do?' and it's hard to find easy to use answers that don't involve vendor lock-in. Or me having to provide support forever. SSGs with plain text files are brilliant once you are set up, but it's a big hurdle getting there. Best I can do is try to find platforms with sane exit strategie…

> Really hard for non-techies

Yes; but it’s not like even that many techies host their own content.

I love how Jeremy Keith copies everything he tweets to his own site [0]. Wanted to check how he set it all up; but his site isn’t open-sourced.

[0] - https://adactio.com

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#15
post #9

> Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube entice us to give them our creative work. It's time to take it back ... Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself. So, youtube, right? Where would you host your videos if you had a mind to take them back?

Peertube for one.

Even if you want to use Youtube, Floatplane or others to expose your content you can still pull users back to your site and own the creator - user relationship.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#16
post #9

> Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube entice us to give them our creative work. It's time to take it back ... Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself. So, youtube, right? Where would you host your videos if you had a mind to take them back?

I would simply spend millions of dollars serving my own viral videos.

Well. I'd wager you can server your 1 viral video for max a few grand a month.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#17
The issue is that you will always need some type of infrastructure to work.

Maybe we need government investment in infrastructure. Having government infrastructure allows a lot of small businesses to work.

Take for example the road system. There are so many business that depend on the roads. Imagine if they were all owned by private companies that could kick you off at their whim?

The postal system also is very similar, though recently it has been getting less investment.

One advantage of government infrastructure is that there are laws and rights such as due process/freedom of speech/etc.

I am not sure what that would look like in practice for the digital world. One area that be useful is digital identity. Other people have mentioned it, but maybe having the Postal Service provide you with a secure identity card (similar to what Estonia provides). This would enable “social login” without being dependent on Google/Facebook/Apple/etc.

The truth is owning your own platform is beyond what an individual developer or small (or even medium sized) company can do.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#18
post #9

> Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube entice us to give them our creative work. It's time to take it back ... Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself. So, youtube, right? Where would you host your videos if you had a mind to take them back?

YouTube can be used as a host yet not as a platform. Make all your videos unlisted and just use video player on your website.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#19
What's always blown my mind is the trend for businesses to fail to understand this. Building your entire company around AWS means a future competitor also already has full control of your company and access to your data.

And I think the most hilarious example is Microsoft, a trillion-dollar level company which chose to hand over the entirety of the web (by switching to Chromium) and mobile (by abandoning WinMo for Android) and doesn't understand how they handed control of their entire business to their top competitor.

The architects of those two decisions probably guaranteed the future collapse of Microsoft.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would simply spend millions of dollars serving my own viral videos.

Well. I'd wager you can server your 1 viral video for max a few grand a month.

Paid for by all the Google ads you run or money from Patreon haha
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