Always Own Your Platform (2019) • Hacker News Board

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#151

Post by rsolva » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 7:49 AM UTC

lancesells wrote: post #56

jlfyhilfyu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the damage is severe, I don't think it's permanent. Mastodon is far from a powerhouse, but is chugging along happily with a slowly growing user base. Matrix arrived just in time to help prevent Slack and Discord from becoming the defacto real-time communication systems for open source projects. Even SA is starting to heal now that it's out from under lowtax and his bullshit.

I agree with you. But I do think Mastodon and Matrix / Element all have a marketing problem. It's seems to be "here's a clone of a service you use but you own your content". I'm not saying that they don't do things better but they don't market it that way. To beat Twitter be better than Twitter. Make something memorable and unique, give features that beat the stockholder driven choices of the other guys.

My mastodon pitch is it’s «ad-free, community-run and features a chronological feed (no algorithms)».

I used to open with the fact that it's federated, but it's a much harder concept to sell initially. People do appreciate it later on though, when they find out they can follow and interact with a bunch of other social networks and communities.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#152

Post by plater » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 7:55 AM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #139

vinceguidry wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. While I agree with this distinction, I'm not entirely sure that this is wholly accurate. The situations in which Cloudflare might have to intervene with legal content are probably pretty limited (e.g. content that would be legal, yet very controversial, or expose something about…

But you can always change CDN provider in a few minutes, an hour or a day.

You cannot move from Twitter to SomeOtherUnknownPlatform.com or from the App Store to UnknownAppStore.com if those platforms decide they don't want you there. Well you can, but no one will ever see you again. You cannot even move to a well known platform in case your followers are not there (or don't use that OS). At least, it will take years to move them over.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#153

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 8:09 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #43

aqme28 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ain't sure if you know this, but in case you don't, Google is a lot more than just a search engine nowadays.

[deleted]

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#154

Post by Santosh83 » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 8:33 AM UTC

hsn915 wrote: post #150

Santosh83 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't shown up because non-tech people don't demand it. They cave in and use one of the managed solutions like wordpress dot com, squarespace etc. A group of devs need to create a solution even without demand & set about popularising it, which is very hard, when most people are satisfied with cloud solutions and don't see the danger that their data could be lost or vendor captured or censored arbitrarily. The…

The command line is half the problem. The solution should not require command line chops. Should just be a GUI.

One of the simplest combination of solutions that I know in this space is to use Publii CMS to compose your blog and push it to GitHub Pages, which automagically makes your SSL enabled site live. Of course something as trivial as adding your custom domain leads you down a rabbit hole of nameservers, CDN etc. There is probably a simpler path here I'm missing.

But the bigger problem is the non-tech world simply doesn't know about any of this. When they want a site, they straightaway consider Blogger vs Wordpress vs SquareSpace vs Wix vs Shopify. Or just a FB/Instagram Page. In fact the latter often comes before the dedicated sites since you depend on them for networking.

It's a hard problem: how to be fully decentralised, yet connected/indexed/searchable, secure, yet flexible... and all this with sensible defaults and point-and-click to onboard lay people without scaring them away.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#155

Post by Cthulhu_ » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 8:38 AM UTC

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…

But you don't actually need a CDN unless you're optimizing / min-maxing for speed; someone's leftover raspberry pi running in a broom closet halfway across the world can serve a website just as well as an AWS cluster can.

Of course, if you get bigger you need to start making some concessions, but for a lot of people that's wishful thinking.

I remember when I was 16, there were these guys that made really shitty voiceovers and edits for videos and put them online. They just had a computer running at home. It'd get hammered whenever they uploaded a new video, but it worked. They didn't rely on anyone else - hell, this was before youtube was a thing.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#156

Post by rmbyrro » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 8:44 AM UTC

The main issue for creators is distribution.

They go to platforms for that. If they host on their own, they lose it.

Aside, it talks about ditching the middleman.

Problem is these platforms already dominated people's attention. They are an unavoidable middleman. Creators have to compete for attention there, convincing these platforms they deserve some.

Unless these problems are solved in large scale by open alternatives, nothing will change.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#157

Post by Cthulhu_ » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 8:56 AM UTC

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…

I mean "just learn HTML and upload it" will always work, you can provide them with a simple template as well if needs be (e.g. http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ ), but they would also need to learn FTP or its equivalent built into their file browser.

But I'd argue those are easier than wordpress itself. Plus, WP is quite invasive in that it will do its own updates, and most plugins try to push some paid services as well.

I'm sure there's more minimalist WP alternatives though.

What about a blogging platform that runs as a self-contained single page application (minimal) that gets its contents from text files? I'm sure it exists somewhere.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#158

Post by MarquesMa » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 9:04 AM UTC

It's hard to distribute content from your own platform. Most successful content creators are relying on many platforms, it's virtually impossible to fight them.

But it's always to have a small resort of yours on the internet. It doesn't have to be big and great, and it can be as simple as a business card that points to your footprints on every other platform.

For example, many Russian content creators are losing their audience immediately after they're sanctioned. It's always a good thing when people search your name, your own site appears on the first page.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#159

Post by benoliver999 » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 9:51 AM UTC

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.

That's what stuff like Netlify does. You just set up a git hook to build the site when you push, and it all happens automatically.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#160

Post by Arathorn » Fri, Jun 10, 2022, 9:51 AM UTC

generalk wrote: post #76

Arathorn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Element (on Matrix) may be superficially a clone of slack or discord, but it already does some things significantly better: * End-to-end encryption * Spaces as freeform hierarchies of rooms * Widgets, to embed arbitrary webapps into your chatrooms * Open standard API However, the point is more that Matrix can do way more than this given it’s a protocol: Element Call is already a better UX for conferencing than Hangou…

Definitely, better marketing around differentiation. I'm a huge dork for open standards, I frequently miss the days of Gaim/Pidgin and having Google Talk be Jabber/XMPP underneath, and being able to IM my friends wherever. Personally, I'm probably going to dork around with Matrix/Element because it sounds like my kind of thing. But I can't figure why I'd switch to it for work. I moved my company recently from Teams t…

What you can do with Element is:

* Have signal-style end-to-end encryption by default, if you care about keeping your data secure on the server.

* Pick from a huge range of alternative clients, including hooking up custom ones thanks to Element being built on the open Matrix standard. For instance, if you wanted to plonk an Intercom-style chat box on your website which funnelled into your support chatrooms, there are a a bunch of different matrix-as-chatbox clients you could use

* Bridge to other platforms as if you were using them natively (as per the sibling comment) - e.g. if you already have other chat systems flying around the place, you can easily unify them in Matrix

* Talk to people outside your company. If you care about collaborating with external people (other developers; customers; partners; suppliers; sibling companies etc) then Matrix's intrinsic decentralisation means you can just talk to them via the public Matrix network. For instance, I spend my life collaborating with folks on the mozilla, KDE, GNOME, Ansible etc Matrix servers without having to think (let alone manage a million different tabs and identities and crappy clients for their various communities).

So, that's the pitch.