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Always Own Your Platform (2019)

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#171

Post by marc_io »

Santosh83 wrote: post #154
hsn915 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Publii is a good one but it lacks proper marketing. It's just not promoted enough. It also does not have a mobile app, and don't support pages. It could be a good solution for non-tech people that want to own their space and can't spend too much money/time, but it would need to change substantially for that to happen.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#172

Post by mrtksn »

pgcj_poster wrote: post #169
mrtksn wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where do you find this content? Can you link a few examples of good content(in your opinion, of course)?

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#174

Post by KronisLV »

plater wrote: post #152
KronisLV wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

It depends entirely on how many of their offerings you choose to use: https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-product-portfolio/

That's like saying that your application that is running in AWS can easily be moved elsewhere, but that's going to be true only sometimes: a lot of the time you'll use their managed services (which may or may not be compatible with others), their SDKs for setting up the infrastructure (which may or may not be trivial to migrate) and might end up with a lot of knowledge that's largely only valid within their ecosystem.

But that's mostly because a lot of the larger service providers out there try to expand their market reach and provide lots of different services: like I could go to my domain registrar and get either managed hosting or VPSes.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#175

Post by NateEag »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #101
NateEag wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How is running syncthing better than git or the site generator?

Sorry, I was really vague there.

If you run syncthing on your mobile device, you could make edits to a local copy of your plain-text content, and have those edits auto-committed/rendered/synced when they hit a computer housing the actual git repo.

I personally despise typing on my smartphone because I'm so much slower on it and I'm much more error-prone this way, but I use something like this for managing my personal todo.txt file and it works pretty well.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#176

Post by NateEag »

Gigachad wrote: post #125
NateEag wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I dunno.

I have basically this working with my todo.txt file between my laptop and phone, and it's incredibly low-maintenance. Most CMSes mean running a complex app, a full DB engine, and having to stay on top of security updates for all that. Heaven help you if you run a CMS with a bunch of third-party extensions.

For my static sites I have SSH and nginx. Nothing else needed.

Static isn't always the answer, but where it does fit it's hard to beat for simplicity and efficiency.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#177

Post by Zak »

asddubs wrote: post #132
rubyskills wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because you could argue that slack and discord replaced IRC. I wonder if we will have cycles or if commercial hosted solutions will always win this arms race.

unless you happen to own freenode/libera.chat, you don't own your own platform on IRC either. same for mastodon, unless you happen to own the mastodon instance you're on, you don't own it. And the old web had plenty of platforms too, tripod and geocities were platforms as well. You could take it a step further still and say that unless you have a server that's sitting in your own basement, you don't own your own plat…

This is where federation matters. I can choose where I host a Matrix room or Mastodon account and other people using other service providers can interact. It's even possible to move a Mastodon account from one provider to another without losing contacts, though this looks to have some rough edges.

I don't think everyone should necessarily own their platform, but it's very valuable to have the option to migrate anything that's a critical part of your identity or business to a different provider.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#178

Post by TranquilMarmot »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #51
TranquilMarmot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, Microsoft did that because they didn't view the web or mobile as mission-critical to their success as a business. Obviously they tried to invest in those areas and failed miserably (pre-Chromium Edge was awful, Windows Mobile was doomed to fail against iOS/Android). Here's an interesting breakdown of their profit: https://techbehemoths.com/blog/how-microsoft-makes-billions Azure is a huge cash cow,…

Azure, however, is a platform built atop the web platform. Google, a competitor with Azure, has complete control of the platform Azure is built on. Even if Edge or WinMo aren't successful in their own right, nobody in their right mind should hand the underpinnings of their business to a competitor. Like, this would be if the US decided to use Russian rocket motors on their nuclear missiles because their best tech exp…

> Azure, however, is a platform built atop the web platform

Not necessarily, though, right? "The web" isn't just web browsers and mobile devices. Most code that I write that's run in the cloud is just "compute" and is crunching numbers.

If anything, Microsoft is relying on Intel/AMD for all of their processors, as well as any other third party hardware manufacturers. Intel could force Microsoft to change all of their Azure servers in some way for them to upgrade and they wouldn't have much of a choice. Probably why Apple and Google have started to develop their own chips and hardware.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#179

Post by hello_marmalade »

Arathorn wrote: post #70
lancesells wrote: post #56

Earlier 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.

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…

As much as I love FOSS, Element isn’t even close to Discord. Discord has one click streaming, easy to understand voice rooms, etc. You don’t have to sort out hosting, and the overall UI experience is sharper and feels more polished. Visually Element is nice, but it has some clunk to it.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#180

Post by hello_marmalade »

rsolva wrote: post #151
lancesells wrote: post #56

Earlier 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.

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.

My biggest problem with Mastodon is it’s psychotic user base.
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