Bro just found fediverse
A simple web we own
41–50 of 240 posts
Re: A simple web we own
#42The real barrier was never technical. It was convenience and discovery. Running a Pi at home is trivial for anyone on HN, but the moment you want people to actually find your stuff, you need DNS, a stable IP, and some way to not get buried under the noise. Tailscale and similar overlay networks have made the "accessible from anywhere" part way easier than it used to be. The missing piece is still discovery. RSS was t…
> The missing piece is still discovery.
I think the key issue here is that Attention is a temporal construct, meaning discovery is often tied to "being the first thing that comes to people's minds" which means SEO, reverse engineering the ranking algorithms, and constantly having to manage an "online persona". Note none of those things contribute to the actual work you're doing, just your "marketing department" (and whatever time/financial "budget" you intend to give it).
MrBeast figured out the YouTube algorithm - post early and often. Is that how we exist on modern Internet when every website/thumbnail is engineered by a team to maximize clickthrough rates? I agree RSS is useful, but it faces the same scalability issues if everyone starts filling up your RSS feeds. Given the limited amount of time you can devote to a particular task, we'll return to the era of A/B testing Headlines.
Re: A simple web we own
#43The irony of this being fully hosted on GitHub should not be lost. A toaster is sufficient to host a mostly static site, a VPS would be far more than sufficient.
Re: A simple web we own
#44I remember a web when practically every ISP allowed you to have a "home page" hosted with them. Your home page was situated in the "public_html" directory of your home directory on their server — hence the name.
Then the URL was http://www./~
I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time.
Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?
Re: A simple web we own
#45The irony of this being fully hosted on GitHub should not be lost. A toaster is sufficient to host a mostly static site, a VPS would be far more than sufficient.
GitHub is free, a VPS isn't.
Re: A simple web we own
#46The only way we own a web of our own is to develop much more of a culture of leaving smallish machines online all the time. Imagine something like Tor or BitTorrent, but everyone has a very simple way of running their own node for content hosting. That always-on device? To get critical mass, instead of just the nerds, you'd need it to ship with devices which are always-on, like routers/gateways, smart TV's. Then you'…
This is very right. There are two obstacles. (1) Security. An always-on, externally accessible device will always be a target for breaking in. You want the device to be bulletproof, and to have defense in depth, so that breaking into one service does not affect anything else. Something like Proxmox that works on low-end hardware and is as easy to administer as a mobile phone would do. We are somehow far from this yet…
Both or those are solved by having a tunnel and a cache that is hosted in the cloud. Something like tailscale or cloudflare provides this pretty much out of the box, but wireguard + nginx on a cheap VPS would accomplish much the same if you are serious about avoiding the big guys.
Re: A simple web we own
#47I really like this model for individual services.
The challenge I've always felt, is shared services -- if I'm running infra myself, I can depend upon it, but if someone else is running it, I'm never really sure if I can, which makes external services really hard to rely on and invest into.
Maybe you can get further than expected with individual services? But shared services at some point seem really useful.
I think web2 solved that in an unfortunate way, where you know the corporations operating the services / networks are aligned in some ways but not in others.
But would be great to have shared services that do have better guarantees. Disclaimer, we're working on something in that direction, but really curious what others have seen or thinking in this area.
Re: A simple web we own
#48It's not about ease of publishing. The issue is what people get in return for publishing. Until you can design a platform that gives top creators as much money+attention as commercial platforms, you'll see a drain of top creators and their viewers to commercial platforms.
100%. You don't even need to give people money. It's about attention and feedback.
People post photos on Instagram and status updates on Facebook because their friends will see it there and give it a thumbs up.
A couple of decades ago, I spent a lot of time laboriously building a website for scratch for my photography. It was objectively a really nice site. I had my own domain, hosted it on a VPS, and put a ton of work into the layout and design.
But none of my friends ever thought to go there. I could see by my web stats that every now and then a random stranger would find the site... but they had no easy way of connecting with me and acknowledging that they saw it. If they put a lot of effort in, they could find my email address and email, but that's a hell of a lot harder than just clicking a little thumbs up button next to a Facebook post or filling a comment in the comment box.
Uploading photos to my site was about as rewarding as printing them out and throwing them in the trash. I thought about adding support for that to my site, but then it opens the whole can of worms around user-generated content, abuse, moderation, etc.
Eventually, I moved to Flickr, which at the time was an actual community that gave me that connection. Then Flickr fizzled out. Now, on the rare times I bother to process a photo... I just upload it to Facebook because that's where (a dwindling subset of) my friends are.
It's not about the content. It's about the human connection. A CMS won't fix that.
Re: A simple web we own
#49The irony of this being fully hosted on GitHub should not be lost. A toaster is sufficient to host a mostly static site, a VPS would be far more than sufficient.
GitHub is free, a VPS isn't.
You know what they say about the kind of services FAANG gives away for free...
And yes, I get the practicality of it. However, when people are actually doing shit like this[1] in the real world, writers of manifestos might consider practicing what they preach a tad more.
Re: A simple web we own
#50As the author of a content management system I made with the idea to democratize internet content creation, I've had a lot of the same thoughts that the author brings up here. I've always thought that even learning Markdown was a bridge to far when it comes to empowering non-technical users however. In my experience it's best just to supply tooling similar to Word where you have buttons for things like lists and bold…
> supply tooling similar to Word just fyi, Word still has Save As -> Web Page (.htm). For a blog post or newsletter type thing i bet it works just fine.
I wonder if some part of the FrontPage [0] codebase lives on in there...