I don’t think the hosting is even that hard of a problem.
It’s the network and discovery effects of platforms that are hard to duplicate.
Always Own Your Platform (2019)
161–170 of 190 posts
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#162Really 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…
I think there are SSG front-ends that are quite good.
I find that writing in HTML is fiddly for regular blogging but I do agree it's a lower barrier to entry than it seems for simply writing a single page.
When I show people my text-file SSG system, they love writing in markdown, they love that the site is 'portable', but they don't tend to want to get involved with the templating etc.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most regular non-tech people this is true. I think it’s best to control your own platform but you can still leverage Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc to grow your brand and make sure they’re onboarded to your own platform of sorts.
Videos on YouTube will get 800x more views than views on yourownvideowebsite.com (assuming you aren’t a major Hollywood studio). Donald Trump went from 90 million followers on Twitter to 3.2 million followers on his own Twitter clone, and he has such a loyal following that people literally committed treason for him. Network effects are impossible to ignore
It's probably worth pointing out that many people who followed Trump on Twitter weren't fans of his, but people who wanted to keep up with what he was saying (perhaps as critics, journalists, etc) and already had a Twitter account for other purposes. The folks who folowed him to his own Twitter clone were (by and large) actual fans who suppported him.
If you dislike Trump but want to monitor his actions, following him on Twitter might make sense. Joining a platform dominated by Trump supporters probably wouldn't.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#164> 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…
> I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on CDNs
Personally, although i'm not dogmatic about it, i'm rather opposed to CDNs for two reasons:
1) For performance reasons: unless you're distributing video, removing bloat from your webpage makes it faster to load from anywhere (including bad connection on the other side of the world) than to add a CDN on top ; i've already got a TCP route to your server so if you stay under 1MB that's much faster than to resolve a new domain and open a new route
2) For security reasons: CDNs are often used to distribute scripts, which are the #1 entrypoint for infecting users with malware. Also, as you pointed out, "anti-DDOS" reverse-proxies like CloudFlare are yet another case and should not be used in 99.99% of cases, because TLS will be terminated on their side and they can read all your users passwords!
I believe the web would be a much better place if content was served from a single origin (i believe it was not done originally because most of us didn't have enough bandwidth to consider the option). For shared content across origins, there's much better solutions than CDNs in the form of Content-Addressed Storage (eg. Bittorrent/IPFS/DAT). Whether you download it from a single trusted source (eg. your ISP), or in a p2p fashion is your choice... but a location-addressed protocol like HTTP is not well-suited for distributing static content across the world.
If only browser vendors (read: Google) were not too busy destroying our URL bars or inventing new tracking systems for advertisements that would be a fixed problem by now. But no, who needs reliable content distribution for smaller websites when you can have WebGL and a Battery API to better track users and make it harder for competitors to implement browsers?! I guess it also doesn't help that Google who develops for ~90% market share is the biggest 3rd party origin today with Google Fonts, Google Analytics, Firebase, etc.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#165I wonder if Substack qualifies as owning your own platform, since you can export your subscriber/email list even if they kick you off the platform and go somewhere else.
It doesn't, but for me keeping a copy of your content somewhere local is more important than 'owning your platform'.
I lost a whole blog I ran daily from 2005-2013 because when I set it up I didn't understand vendor lock-in. I just used the web form, fired-and-forgot about the posts. When it came time to move to a new host, the pictures all got compressed and the formatting got thrown out. It's not a mistake I'll make twice, now every blog post is stored in text files before it goes anywhere.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#166I don't think you need to own your own platform. It's a trade-off decision between total cost of ownership and your time. You can buy a new server with enough power to be able to serve everybody even during huge spikes but it's expensive, however relatively maintenance-free. You can have and old PC with low upfront costs but old consumer-grade hardware breaks down and you have to maintain it (sometimes we have to speak about "preventive maintenance"). Or you can put your things into a VPS or cloud for the price of electricity and a good internet connection alone (at least in my country, prices really are THAT low).
If you don't vendor-lock yourself in you can then move your things from one VPS/cloud to another. And you don't even have to start with Kubernetes cluster upfront. You can start with "old-school" "bare metal + operating system with root access" server, then move your application behind a load balancer, then to Docker/K8s when it grows. I see so many projects suffocating to death by "thinking big". I even encountered an e-commerce site which didn't even had a proper payment gateways, well, Cash on Delivery services still exist today. Not ideal but it worked (and the goods arrived OK).
But I'm not telling to "own your platform", that's BS nowadays. "Always have a way out" is much better. Start small and right-size often.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#167> 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.
Agreed if you make them all unlisted AND:
1) set the iframe width="514" height="289" or smaller that will remove the "Watch on YouTube" link (viewers can still view in fullscreen)
2) add ?modestbranding=1 to the end of the src url, this will also remove the "YouTube" link
Then add your own comments system to your embedded page and monetize how you see fit.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#168Earlier 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?
If you own the page where they are embedded, YOU own the content. Your YouTube goes away, you can place the video elsewhere (or even back on another YouTube channel) and update your embedding to point to the new location. You still own the page and any comments and/or monetization you might have established.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've heard of Mastadon, even tried it but couldn't get any value of the contents on it. The last time I looked at it, most of the content was about Mastadon and welcome messages. I was expecting to see some crazy stuff like flat earthers or antivaxxers but even that was not available. I'm also not sure that I used it correctly, maybe I needed to find servers or something. Anyway, my point it is that the lack of disco…
I think the trick is to find an instance where the people mostly share your interests. When I first tried mastodon.social, I didn't get anywhere. But when I found a more niche instance, I was able to find a lot of good content on the local timeline, which gave me people to follow and gradually exposed me to the larger fediverse.
Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)
#170Really 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…
Installing and managing anything computer related is so hard these days. Take programming for example. I started many years ago on C. I could literally copy a compiler executable out of an archive and it's ready to go. PHP was an apt install command. Want to use it on the web or with a database? A couple of more install commands. Guides were simple to follow, and they worked. I'm trying to install Python for my daugh…
Python isn't a special case either, same issue with node, php/composer, R, and many others. I pretty much do this for a living now, it seems like most of my skillset is figuring out how things should run without making too much of a mess.