Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Poor Man's Web

zserge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 82 posts

Re: Poor Man's Web

#41

Post by zoogeny »

surprisetalk wrote: post #18

I recently documented some similar thoughts on the “cheap” web: [1] https://potato.cheap IMO, protocol is largely a distraction from the good stuff. The question I’ve been wondering lately is, “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?”

There is a proverb: "If the Mountain won’t go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must come to the Mountain"

Most people don't have personal websites because getting an audience of users to a personal website is like asking a mountain to come to you.

Another proverb is: "Meet people where they are at"

There are exceptions to these proverbs but they require exceptional people or exceptional circumstances. The vast majority of people are not trying to be exceptional with respect to the kinds of things they would put on their personal websites. Very few individuals are willing to put the effort into "moving mountains" to build an audience on their own website.

Re: Poor Man's Web

#42

Post by aleph_minus_one »

Relevant concerning the given example server typed-hole.org:79:

  $ echo "feed" | nc typed-hole.org 79
  
  julienxx@nein.club toots:
  
  thread 'main' panicked at src/main.rs:52:39:
  called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: reqwest::Error { kind: Request, url: Url { scheme: "https", cannot_be_a_base: false, username: "", password: None, host: Some(Domain("nein.club")), port: None, path: "/api/v1/accounts/01C2ETC44GDGZ27S9WKZMSHKWV/statuses", query: Some("limit=5&exclude_reblogs=true&exclude_replies=true"), fragment: None }, source: hyper::Error(Connect, Ssl(Error { code: ErrorCode(1), cause: Some(Ssl(ErrorStack([Error { code: 167772294, library: "SSL routines", function: "tls_post_process_server_certificate", reason: "certificate verify failed", file: "../ssl/statem/statem_clnt.c", line: 1889 }]))) }, X509VerifyResult { code: 18, error: "self-signed certificate" })) }
  note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace
Looks like an error.

Re: Poor Man's Web

#43

Post by WaitWaitWha »

guestbest wrote: post #14
arkh wrote: post #4

Gemini protocol using :// again. I feel like more people should watch Dylan Beattle's "The Web that Never Was" presentation. > gem:my.domain.com/hello

Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t slashes typically reserved for flags on Unix and back slashes on dos/windows? If that’s the case then surely the vertices line, pipe symbol |, would be the most visually appropriate? Piping remote data over a network connection and through the local client program to parse seems to be the kind of thing bike shedding was intended for, in agreement but focusing on semantics. It just…

> Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t slashes typically reserved for flags on Unix and back slashes on dos/windows?

Forward slash (/) in DOS, while dash, tack, or hyphen (-) are used for UNIX for command line flags or parameters. The / in UNIX was for the path. The backslash (\) is for DOS paths. (Caveat: I started with UNIX in the mid-80s.)

Re: Poor Man's Web

#44

Post by aleph_minus_one »

surprisetalk wrote: post #18

I recently documented some similar thoughts on the “cheap” web: [1] https://potato.cheap IMO, protocol is largely a distraction from the good stuff. The question I’ve been wondering lately is, “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?”

> The question I’ve been wondering lately is, “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?”

The answer from my experience is simple: because most people that I meet are not programmers (at least not in a strict sense), and don't know many programmers.

On the other hand: most programmers and many STEM degree holders that I meet do have their own websites.

Re: Poor Man's Web

#45

Post by mattlondon »

I think Gemini has missed a trick being being deliberately too simple - e.g. no inline images, no tables, no forms, no basic formatting etc.

I know these were deliberately left out for "simplicity" reasons, but then they have a fairly unsimple mechanism for user login/auth that totally undermines their claim for making clients little more than slightly-augmented-terminals, which for me is a smoking gun for these things being missing purely on an ideological basis only and an attempt at controlling how people use it. That's fine, it's their thing and they can do what they want with it.

There is a growing trend of people simply choosing to use XHTML Basic (1). This is a "stripped down" version of HTML originally intended for early phones, PDAs, set top boxes etc - it has the critical missing features of Gemini, but forgoes some of the more "advanced" features of the modern web people have issues with. I'd highly recommend people simply target that instead.

1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Basic

Re: Poor Man's Web

#46

Post by [deleted] »

surprisetalk wrote: post #18

I recently documented some similar thoughts on the “cheap” web: [1] https://potato.cheap IMO, protocol is largely a distraction from the good stuff. The question I’ve been wondering lately is, “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?”

[deleted]

Re: Poor Man's Web

#47

Post by brabel »

JohnMakin wrote: post #21

I like the gist and spirit of this, of course, but isn’t this basically impossible in today’s day and age? For instance, if I want to host a small web server running in my closet to serve cat memes to a small number of users, I still am beholden to my ISP who 1) must allow me to host a web server in its TOS and 2) provide me a static address. I don’t really see any way to get around corporations on the internet, unle…

The easiest choice today is to use either GitHub Pages or Netlify to host your website. You can literally just drag and drop files on their Admin web page and have something immediatelly published online.

If you want to run code instead of just keep a static website, then you may need to get a cheap server from a multitude of companies that offer that (Linode, Digital Ocean, AWS etc) but I find that you can almost always get away with static sites which require next to no work and will stay up as long as those companies are still functioning (or don't shut down the free plan).

Re: Poor Man's Web

#48

Post by ugjka »

basscomm wrote: post #37
surprisetalk wrote: post #18

I recently documented some similar thoughts on the “cheap” web: [1] https://potato.cheap IMO, protocol is largely a distraction from the good stuff. The question I’ve been wondering lately is, “why don’t most people I meet have personal websites?”

I can think of three reasons that more people don't have personal websites: 1. For non technical users (and there are lots of them) learning enough HTML and figuring out how to put it somewhere accessible is too high of a bar to overcome (forget about updating it ever). It's quicker and easier to just establish a presence on some social media site. 2. For technical users who are capable of setting up a website, it's…

If you host things on a cheap VPS you also have to pay attention how much traffic you are allowed to consume and excess will add up to your bill. Some bad bot or enemy can certainly give a nice surprise at the end of the month if you don't pay attention to alerts on your account

Re: Poor Man's Web

#49

Post by krapp »

mattlondon wrote: post #45

I think Gemini has missed a trick being being deliberately too simple - e.g. no inline images, no tables, no forms, no basic formatting etc. I know these were deliberately left out for "simplicity" reasons, but then they have a fairly unsimple mechanism for user login/auth that totally undermines their claim for making clients little more than slightly-augmented-terminals, which for me is a smoking gun for these thin…

It looks like this still supports the script tag, which seems to be the biggest "modern web" feature people want to abandon.

Re: Poor Man's Web

#50

Post by kej »

JohnMakin wrote: post #21

I like the gist and spirit of this, of course, but isn’t this basically impossible in today’s day and age? For instance, if I want to host a small web server running in my closet to serve cat memes to a small number of users, I still am beholden to my ISP who 1) must allow me to host a web server in its TOS and 2) provide me a static address. I don’t really see any way to get around corporations on the internet, unle…

If anything I think it's easier today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. There are plenty of free static hosts, free tiers on various cloud hosts for interactive sites, and services like ngrok or Cloudflare Tunnels that can safely expose a home server to the internet.
Post reply on HN