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Let's make the indie web easier

gilest.org

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Re: Let's make the indie web easier

#11

Post by bruce511 »

I write web server creation tools, so I'm somewhat familiar with this space.

I'm not sure I'd recommend shared hosting setups. If you're going that route then you might as well host on WordPress.com or squarespace or whatever.

The logical place to serve is of course from your home machine. These days there are lots of users with good access, good enough to serve. Assuming you don't have a crappy ISP that blocks incoming ports.

Even with a dynamic IP address its trivial for a server to keep its domain updated. (Use a DNS provider that supports APIs, like DNSimple.)

But I'm not sure that the actual headline of this article is necessary. Making your own Web server is easy already. If you don't have the time, or skill, to set up a box now, then you likely don't have the understanding of how much is needed "long term".

Web serving is not like posting to Instagram. It's not fire and forget. It takes long-term maintainence. Keep that DNS alive (with money). Keep that server software updated. Understand "this folder on my machine is public". Keep a casual eye on the automatic certificates. Don't freak out when you see endless scripts probing with strange requests. Monitor the comments section (you want engagement right? Until you discover all your sign ups and comments are spammers.)

So yeah, there's a barrier to entry. But perhaps that's a good thing. Perhaps a "minimum level of effort" acts as a barrier to keep the really unsafe behaviours from becoming universal.

Put another way, my mom should not be hosting a Web server, regardless of how easy it is to do.

Re: Let's make the indie web easier

#12

Post by marcus_holmes »

This. So much.

I kinda do hate Wordpress. I hate that it's so inefficient. It optimises for authors not readers, in that it's easy for authors to create sites and posts, but to display a post to a reader it has to fetch everything from the database and then process all the PHP code into HTML and only finally actually serve it to the user. It needs an actual server, and a database, and all that maintenance and updates, etc.

I want Hugo with a GUI (and ideally runs on a phone). Something that pushes to a static page (so free hosting on Git??b/Cloudflare/whatever) but doesn't make me jump through all the hoops that Hugo does.

Re: Let's make the indie web easier

#13

Post by fragmede »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #12

This. So much. I kinda do hate Wordpress. I hate that it's so inefficient. It optimises for authors not readers, in that it's easy for authors to create sites and posts, but to display a post to a reader it has to fetch everything from the database and then process all the PHP code into HTML and only finally actually serve it to the user. It needs an actual server, and a database, and all that maintenance and updates…

what if it was backed by sqlite instead?

Re: Let's make the indie web easier

#14

Post by r3trohack3r »

The indie web is unbelievably easy.

What is unbelievably easy:

1. Generating a website

2. Writing content locally

3. Adding media to your local site

4. Making your website available on the network

5. Giving your website a meaningful name with DNS

6. Sharing your website name with your friends

And it’s unbelievably easy to pave that path for non-technical users.

What is unbelievably hard:

1. Finding a reliable route between your friends and your local website

The network you publish to isn’t the network your friends are on. You are on a subnet. And the identifier for your subnet is dynamic. And the identifier for your friends subnet is dynamic.

On the modern web, it’s easier for two devices on the same street in Illinois to rendezvous at a datacenter in Virginia than it is to find a stable and reliable route to the device down the street.

The web isn’t broken. The internet is.

The web is an overlay network on top of the internet. We need a better internet.

Personally, I believe libp2p is that better internet.

Re: Let's make the indie web easier

#16

Post by revskill »

Cli is hard because you need to tweak dotfiles hell or hoping the tool understand your environment, and also know how to upgrade itself. Also using terminal on windows, with native c libraries, with cydwin hell ?.

Re: Let's make the indie web easier

#20

Post by seeknotfind »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #14

The indie web is unbelievably easy. What is unbelievably easy: 1. Generating a website 2. Writing content locally 3. Adding media to your local site 4. Making your website available on the network 5. Giving your website a meaningful name with DNS 6. Sharing your website name with your friends And it’s unbelievably easy to pave that path for non-technical users. What is unbelievably hard: 1. Finding a reliable route b…

It took a few clicks to find the relevant docs, but this is where libp2p explains how it connects private networks. tl;dr via relay servers or by creating two simultaneous outgoing connections to just make a direct connection. Very cool.

https://connectivity.libp2p.io/#hole-punching

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