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Always Own Your Platform (2019)

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#121

Post by hsn915 »

urlwolf wrote: post #117
hsn915 wrote: post #32

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 mak…

Have you seen cloudron.io? They are spot on solving the problem you describe

It does not seem to even be the same ball park.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#122

Post by imperio59 »

codedokode wrote: post #53
azangru wrote: 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 has not much value as a video hosting. You can host your video anywhere else easily. Youtube's value is viewers that will accidentally discover your video. Nobody will watch your videos if you publish them at your own website.

Sorry but have you tried hosting your own video?

There's only really one set of codecs that works across all devices. Video Player libraries that work really well with features like captions/subtitles, speed controls, automatic resolution shifting are hard to find, much less if you are not technical.

If you want to cater to an audience outside the western world you'll want a video processing pipeline to downscale your videos to lower resolutions.

Ideally you'd want to chunk up the video into something like HLS playlists so navigating around the video wouldn't require someone to wait until the download caught up to the middle of the file... the list goes on.

Video is still hard. The big players make it seem easy, but it's not, in my experience, that simple.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#123

Post by vinceguidry »

bragr wrote: post #44
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…

Unless you are using Cloudflare's specialized security services, CDN is pretty interchangeable and easy to switch between. You can ever do dynamic DNS things to use multiple CDNs at the same time and shift different traffic segments onto different providers if you are into that sort of things, or tier one CDN behind another to act as a mid tier. I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on C…

In other words, CDN isn't a platform, it's a service. Consume services, but own your platform. Cloudflare's not going to shut your web presence down because you're "competing" with them or just plain doing something they don't like. YouTube or Apple absolutely will.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#124

Post by sanderjd »

cmg wrote: post #92
sanderjd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but going back to the grandparent's point: what is the incentive to do that? It's really hard to be better than Twitter. I know Twitter kind of sucks and everyone here thinks they have too many employees, but the truth is that all of those employees are doing stuff, that despite it kind of sucking, it remains incredibly hard and extremely expensive to actually make something better. I just don't see how these plat…

> It's really hard to be better than Twitter. It is, but right now people don't care as much about privacy as features and community. It's not what people who focus on openness or privacy want, but it's the reality. Where are the celebrities and brands? Where are the conversations happening? Where are my friends ? This is the challenge.

Yes ... but that's never going to change, so what's the proposal here?

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#125

Post by Gigachad »

NateEag wrote: post #88
FalconSensei wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Even with SSG set up, having to be on the computer to create a draft, or make a quick correction, is really a bother. I think you might be able to solve this with Syncthing and a watch process on your syncthing server. Commit and render on each change, and optionally sync if the rendered site is different from the previous version. ...granted, that's a really tech-nerd setup.

At that point you may as well use a real cms.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#126

Post by Gigachad »

nvr219 wrote: post #79

Hosting your own LAMP server is one thing, but I have been touching computers for 30 years and I still would not trust myself to to roll my own ecommerce anything. It sucks but I'll always outsource with shopify/paypal/patreon/whatever.

You can’t even run your own realistically. Taking credit cards requires an insanely difficult and expensive auditing process for basically no benefit when you could be up and running instantly with PayPal/etc.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#127

Post by cy_overlord »

Not everyone needs a platform to be honest. Most people lives their lives without posting anything online, just jumping from platform to platform searching for something to consume. And the argument that people would worried if they lost access to their data is almost invalid, most don't even backup their phones, much less data on platforms.

And for people who needs to distribute stuff, they would just opt-in for every platform, self-owned or big tech.

Removing middlemen or the whole decentralization thing is a welcomed change, so we get more to be in control more. But this is a paradigm shift, like how we moved from offline to online, the ways and methods of doing things need to change. For instance, instead of self-hosting the entire thing, I imagine a way for people to actually host their own data, while big tech host the frontend and backend. When you want your data to be displayed on Facebook, you will need to provide a temporary access key that can be revoked anytime.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#128

Post by laurex »

bumper_crop wrote: post #31

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 gett…

Does no-code make this better or worse?

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#129

Post by Gigachad »

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…

Why would this be perfect? It sounds like suggesting that in a perfect would everyone would grow their own food, generate their own power, process their own sewerage, etc to make sure they are not dependant on anyone.

But ultimately we can see that depending on others and centralising services gives us more. Yes sometimes those services fail and it’s out of your control, but you still lived a better life having relied on them. I get the feeling that HN users have a hard time feeling that they are not in total control of every aspect of their lives.

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