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What Is the Small Web?

ar.al

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Re: What Is the Small Web?

#111

Post by gonehome »

gonehome wrote: post #105
ForHackernews wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the last time this came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859156 > the core of the whole system (the Nock language) has "loobeans" instead of booleans in which 1 represents false and 0 represents true at which point I nope'd out pretty hard. >> Being contrarian is not the same as being clever, and this is very much not clever.

Yeah, no disagreement from me there. That bit is dumb and he admitted it was a mistake to do that. It doesn’t mean that everything is bad. I was skeptical initially too, but was curious enough to check it out. I was surprised when I did. It's a small community and product is still in pre-widespread adoption stage (though far enough along to be useful for people to play with): https://urbit.org/understanding-urbit/roa…

Also (not excusing the bad design) 0 is often the success error code in Unix for the shell and 1 or something else is often error.

So it’s not entirely without precedent, but it’s still an unnecessary and confusing inversion for true and false.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#112

Post by dna_polymerase »

kgraves wrote: post #52
dna_polymerase wrote: post #25

> Currently, all our developer tools and technical infrastructure comes from Big Tech and the Big Web. They are optimised for creating Big Tech and the Big Web. What the fuck are you talking about? Nobody forces you to host your personal website on a k8s cluster. > While we can repurpose some of them for our own uses, we also need tools specifically optimised for building single-tenant web applications and the Small…

> What the fuck are you talking about? Nobody forces you to host your personal website on a k8s cluster. But he is right, almost all the dev tools we used are by surveillance capitalists only further entrenching our reliance on them, think React, Pytorch, React Native, or even K8S etc. These tools only benefit the the big tech companies and we are going down a path of no return. > How about Apache for local testing a…

> But he is right, almost all the dev tools we used are by surveillance capitalists only further entrenching our reliance on them, think React, Pytorch, React Native, or even K8S etc.

What? The source of all these things is open. I do not rely on any of these companies when using these tools now. Of course if I use them in conjunction with their cloud services I am dependent on say Amazon or Google. But the open nature of their software provides me with everything I need to use it without the dependence on said companies. Your critique is mostly blind, unbalanced tribalism.

> These tools only benefit the the big tech companies and we are going down a path of no return.

No they are free to everyone. You could use them for whatever you like.

> This is way too technical for most people, Aral is building something everyone can use in a few steps and has privacy built in.

Frankly, if you are unable to use FTP and XAMPP I don't see you using npm and the CLI.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#114

Post by fluffycritter »

rglullis wrote: post #31

Appropriate all the good values and ideas from https://indieweb.org/ , re-heat it add some feel-good word salad and we have this "Small Web". Yes, by all means let's get back to a more decentralized and distributed web. But providing a service where you are still hosting your site on someone else's servers and on someone else's domain and calling for values is just digital green-washing.

Not to mention how IndieWeb sites already provide way more interoperability than any of these site.js things, while not being beholden to a single stack with a single design philosophy (or an asinine requirement that every site be run as a single tenant on a dedicated server).

Plus, some of us already have post privacy, allowing access via other IndieWeb identities -- as well as making the allowances for people to log in without having to run their own damn website.

IndieWeb principles are based on modularity, communication, community, and compassion. None of those are things I'm getting from Aral's latest vanity project.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#115

Post by fluffycritter »

kgraves wrote: post #80
detaro wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes no sense to turn this into a purity contest. "a company once provided a room for an event", "they provide service credits for all open-source projects that apply" or something like that does not invalidate a movement. In the same way that I don't support going through the sponsor lists of the events Aral talks at to call him a hypocrite - as long as it is peripheral it's sometimes hard to avoid and sometimes…

If this was a mistake and they have changed their mind, sure. If not, (even when warned) it shows they don't have any principles, You won't catch Richard Stallman or anyone rightfully for privacy rights at such an event would you? I would definitely be suspect and would actively call out privacy conferences being hosted and invited by surveillance capitalists.

You seem to be under the impression that IndieWeb is a formalized organization where the people operating under its banner are being paid by said organization.

In reality it's a set of shared goals, which a lot of the people disagree on facets of implementation and the like, and a collection of generally-agreed-to protocols that people can choose to support as part of interoperability with other websites.

I am fairly active in IndieWeb spaces and I disagree with others in these spaces all the time. I've also certainly never accepted any Google money (or any other sponsor) for my contributions, not that it's even been offered. This is the first I'm hearing of "us" being sponsored by Google.

I've seen plenty of material support from Mozilla (because there are several Mozillians involved in the projects) and Okta (for the same reason). But those aren't in any way signs that those companies are steering the decisions being made -- they're just offering things like hosting rooms and providing food at our mini-conferences and providing t-shirts and whatever (and those t-shirts, as far as I know, never have any sponsor logos on them).

Also, we take a more user-centric view of things; while we'd all like people to be on their own self-hosted websites and free of the big social networks and so on, we understand that it's not realistic to just ask everyone to jump ship all at once, and running your own web presence is not what most people want to do. It's much better to build bridges so that people can connect in whatever way works for them, and that's why there are services like brid.gy and so on which people run out of the kindness of their hearts, and paid services like micro.blog that try to make it easier for people to dive in without having to Do All The Things, and people who work on IndieWeb integrations for Wordpress and so on.

And I'm very grateful for things like brid.gy; most of the comments/responses I get on my website come in through that, via people on Twitter and Mastodon and occasionally Reddit. Sometimes I get webmentions from other IndieWeb users, but they're the vast minority. And same goes for private-post logins; most people log in via Twitter or Mastodon, and a bunch use my email-based login mechanism as well, and very few actually log in via IndieAuth. If I were to restrict my interactions to pure IndieWeb I'd have a very lonely presence.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#116

Post by kgraves »

dna_polymerase wrote: post #112
kgraves wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the fuck are you talking about? Nobody forces you to host your personal website on a k8s cluster. But he is right, almost all the dev tools we used are by surveillance capitalists only further entrenching our reliance on them, think React, Pytorch, React Native, or even K8S etc. These tools only benefit the the big tech companies and we are going down a path of no return. > How about Apache for local testing a…

> But he is right, almost all the dev tools we used are by surveillance capitalists only further entrenching our reliance on them, think React, Pytorch, React Native, or even K8S etc. What? The source of all these things is open. I do not rely on any of these companies when using these tools now. Of course if I use them in conjunction with their cloud services I am dependent on say Amazon or Google. But the open natu…

I've seen so many tools made by these companies which were advertised as 'free' turn towards a cloud based model, deprecated, restricted by a patent clause or the ecosystem and development is beholden to a single corporation.

The cloud services is just the start.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#117

Post by gonehome »

outsomnia wrote: post #51
gonehome wrote: post #23

I think this is a good idea and I think making it easy for people to host their own services is valuable. [0] It’s also been tried a few times with little success (sandstorm.io). I think the problem is deeper, modern infrastructure is messy to run, it’s hard to configure, and every thing has to be specifically tweaked to work. Something that works for regular users will require extensive tooling to be useful and will…

With respect, the blog post you pointed to is a load of self-referential blather, when I go to the top of urbit.org I can't see anything because my browser blocks content hosted on google, this project evidently doesn't even try to walk its talk.

You might find the explanation here more helpful: http://hyperstition.al/post/urbit-an-introduction/

The project website isn't trying to be decentralized, it's trying to share information easily with people using existing services.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#118

Post by lvturner »

bergstromm466 wrote: post #60
lvturner wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, my 'Small Web' is a couple of Raspberry Pi plugged in to my router exposing services that are useful to me - the more I use it and the more tech news I read, the more I want to expand both the robustness and diversity of my personal services.

Have you written about that somewhere? What kinds of services do you run yourself?

I'm afraid not - it's nothing particularly exotic, mostly Home Assistant, Pi Hole and Bitwarden password manager.

Next thing I want to add is a bookmark manager - then perhaps some kind of storage solution.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#119

Post by fierarul »

kgraves wrote: post #66
fierarul wrote: post #6

Coining up a new catchy term while simultaneously trying to sell your new and shiny thing rings all kind of alarm bells. At least their software is "non-colonial" which is the 1st time I've seen this term applied to software. Software has never been cheaper and easier to use. If anybody wants to put the smallest amount of effort they can do all this stuff. Maybe people are smarter and know the Internet is a Dark Fore…

What are they 'selling'?

Reading the article would clarify that.

Re: What Is the Small Web?

#120

Post by pmlnr »

gonehome wrote: post #109
aral wrote: post #78

Hey all, Just skimmed the comments (I know, I know, never read the comments) but here are couple of facts in case you care about that sort of thing (but please don’t let these get in the way of a lively discussion) ;) - re: drug dealers/users, see: analogy - Yes, six years ago, we thought we could fix the problem with a phone. Then we started working on the problem and realised we couldn’t possibly raise enough money…

Thanks for the thoughtful response, was HN always this nasty? I think tooling around this idea makes sense and I hope you succeed. I wrote a little allegorical story about this which you might like: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook... I think it's a hard problem and it's exciting to see multiple projects trying to make this better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269016

> was HN always this nasty

Yes, and that's good. We need harsh places.

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