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Always Own Your Platform (2019)

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#31

Post by bumper_crop »

From 2006 to 2014 I owned my own platform. Several actually. But I turned them down after it became a lot of work to maintain. At the time, it wasn't so obvious the web was dying, but in hindsight I probably helped kill it.

In the beginning the web was so new, and growing so fast, with new things, amazing sites, and more people getting online. Like all things in life, competition arises, and better sites started getting much more of the market share. People's expectations for what a website could offer rose tremendously, and would abandon a site if it wasn't up to snuff. Sites needed to have ever improving visuals, better content, better people, better interactivity, better everything.

And I couldn't keep up with it. Users went from being happy to try out something new to dismissive and bitter. More and more it felt like work to try to make them happy, to keep building more and better things. And that's exactly what happened. The Internet became work. It's why we all have to be paid to come to work and build the Internet. No one does it for free, because it's a thankless grueling job. The only websites that survived were the ones that made money, and could afford to use that money to hire people. Google, Facebook, Myspace, Stumbleupon, 9gag, and even Something Awful became money oriented rather than community oriented. They had to, or else.

The advice to "Always Own Your Own Platform" is a euphemistic way of saying make a whole company out of your site and underpay the only employee (you) for ever. The reason we don't own our own platform anymore is because it's soooo annoying to do so. It wasn't an accident.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#32

Post by hsn915 »

As others have pointed out, there's currently no solution that allows common people to self host.

There's a minimum level of linux/sysadmin/devops expertise requried to setup and maintain a self hosted website.

I've written a somewhat long essay about this problem:

https://hasen.substack.com/simple-self-hosting

A solution is possible but no one is working on it yet as far as I can tell.

Instead, everyone wants to make money by taking offline/local applications and turning them into online/cloud applications (even if no specific capability is gained by being on the cloud) just because it's easier to make more money that way.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#33

Post by ChadNauseam »

digitallyfree wrote: post #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…

I think users appreciate having a feed that combines everyone’s posts and algorithmically recommends the best ones, like youtube or twitter do. That can be solved with RSS now, but RSS doesn’t get you likes and replies etc.

And they appreciate having usernames so they can say “check me out at @username”. You can solve that by making everyone buy a domain name, but we have zero infrastructure right now for letting people use their domain name as their username.

The cryptocurrency community does seem at least halfway interested in solving these problems fwiw, but they do still have some major scaling problems to overcome.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#34

Post by mojuba »

So, the eternal "You can host your stuff in your basement" vs. "No, not everyone can host their stuff, it's hard".

Here's (hopefully) some food for thought on how a decentralized web could work in an ideal world in the future.

The problem is, even if you sell amazing shiny turn-key server boxes to every household, where they would be able to seamlessly host everything they currently keep elsewhere (iCloud, Facebook, etc.); even if messaging and other communication becomes absolute P2P in the whole world and therefore there's no need for centralized messaging services —

— there would still be the problem of centralized search. The beauty of Internet is not in its content as much as in the ability to discover it. Search implies there has to be a central place where you start it. This is why everyone - techies or not - tend to push their creations to places that provide exposure and discoverability: Medium, SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Then all that is additionally indexed by a meta-engine that is Google today. Centralization upon centralization.

I think there might be a solution to this which would be a mix of P2P and locally centralized services. Imagine a gigantic balanced tree of indexing engines that belong, say, to communities. Whenever someone performs a search anywhere in the world, the query is propagated through the tree and is processed in a parallel manner by a great many nodes at once. I'm not sure about the exact algorithm right now, but something suggests Google probably works this way anyway. Except in this ideal world, the search engine doesn't belong to a single authority, but is rather split into myriads of local services maintained by (and paid for) by the communities or some small local companies.

If you think it would be wasteful and traffic-heavy, think of the resources and bandwidth that might be freed if Google, Facebook and other giants were replaced by this highly decentralized system, which, again, would work pretty much like the incumbents do, except data would belong to and be hosted by individuals who created it, and search would be one giant brain with potentially millions of cells that perform queries in parallel.

How far fetched is this? Very :) But at least I hope the idea is thought provoking.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#36

Post by gerdesj »

altdataseller wrote: post #5

Sounds cool in theory but almost impossible and impractical. For example, you can have a newsletter but google could decide your domain belongs in Spam forever. There goes that “owned platform”

From your comment you seem to think that Google somehow owns your arse. Perhaps you use them for your email and other functions and fail to see over the top of their walled garden?

There is no doubt that Google largely own Search and several other functions but they really don't own the internet as a whole. Often we see sad articles on HN about how the monster in the room twats someone into oblivion thanks to a stupid "AI" making a judgement call that a human would be embarrassed about. To avoid or perhaps slightly mitigate that fate is well documented hereabouts and elsewhere. For what it is worth (in my experience) Google is not inimical on an arbitrary basis. They really don't decide anything - it's all algorithms, pixie dust and bollocks. Avoid that and you are golden.

As it turns out, I've been able to run many "local" email systems and even my own little IT company quite happily for over two decades, without giving much thought to Google. We do have a newsletter email that we send out too. Some of my customers fly quite close to the edge of the spam/ham boundary.

I operate in the UK. Bizarrely, I can quite happily run SMTP from a domestic FTTC connection here, with a little care.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#37

Post by FalconSensei »

benoliver999 wrote: post #8

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…

> SSGs with plain text files are brilliant once you are set up, but it's a big hurdle getting there.

Even in that case, not nearly as practical, unless you mostly do long-form and only post from your computer. Even with SSG set up, having to be on the computer to create a draft, or make a quick correction, is really a bother.

Also, when you own everything, you end up spending more time tinkering with it, which is not bad per se if you are having fun, but terrible if your goal is to actually post. Those 2 things - harder to post and easier to get sidetracked - explains why so many SSG'd blogs are made up of a few posts explaining why and how it was set up, and maybe a couple actual posts.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#38

Post by enos_feedler »

azangru wrote: post #27
hammock wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that’s not owning your platform. What if youtube decides that your video is in violation of some community guidelines and deletes it?

You can fix that by having backups and hosting elsewhere. The difference is using a service's infrastructure vs. using a platform's reach.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#39

Post by blibble »

azangru wrote: post #27
hammock wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that’s not owning your platform. What if youtube decides that your video is in violation of some community guidelines and deletes it?

sign up again?

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#40

Post by heywoodlh »

rapind wrote: post #26
heywoodlh wrote: post #23

> Distribute [your content] via methods you control. I'm being nitpicky but it feels off to me to call people out on owning their own platform but then use Cloudflare's CDN instead of running their own. And if they did run their own CDN, they would probably have to use AWS or another worldwide cloud provider and not own the hardware. And if I were Richard Stallman I would probably come down on you for using proprieta…

Just like security, you settle for the risk you can afford and are comfortable with. The cloud muddies your grasp of the risks though. A lot of these cloud offerings (like k8s) are incredibly complex, and therefore have a lot of attack vectors, and a lot of points of failure. We depend on layers built on layers, built on layers. You can't really eliminate all of these dependencies, but you can eliminate / reduce some…

> Just like security, you settle for the risk you can afford and are comfortable with

Right, I totally agree. What I'm not a fan of is this site actively encouraging people to call out others for not owning their own content. If we are gonna compare to security, it would be like suggesting everyone should adhere to the same threat model -- which just isn't practical.

> The cloud muddies your grasp of the risks though.

Are you saying "you" generally or me specifically? Because I was just using a CDN built on AWS as an example of not being able to own all parts of your stack. It's mostly impossible for an individual and most companies to build a CDN on their own hardware as most entities don't have datacenters around the world.

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