41–50 of 57 posts
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…
The serving technology is hard.
The dollar cost is high.
The maintenance burden is high.
The authoring experience sucks.
The notification / distribution mechanisms are lacking.
The feedback loops are broken.
Social media sites are simple, free, zero-maintenance, trivial to post, notify/distribute to your friends and others, and build in a feedback system with both automated and human curation.
There's an enormous amount of effort required to provide even a remotely similar level of service.
Indeed, why not let them copy a Word document without even zipping anything (maybe even with a button within Word itself to avoid files and folders)? No need to learn any new typesetting systems, Word in the knowledge a lot of non-tech folks have
I could spin up a docker and nginx, set up my router to allow port forwarding, but the ISP will stand in my way. Port 80 or port 433 won't come through.
No amount of tech on my raspberry-pie will let me self host.
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 incom…
I agree that a certain barrier to entry is a good thing because it means you have to be invested in it. However, setting up your own server and managing a DNS is a far cry from Geocities. Creating a resilient indie web is different from making an interesting indie web
I'm not sure that setting up an "interesting" Web, which is not resilient would be a good thing though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because in her digital home, there are people who will sneak in the back door or find a window they can jimmy open. They'll bring in stolen and illegal stuff, then invite all their fence and dealer friends over to join the party, and pretty soon mom's digital home becomes a meth house.
All of that can happen to your physical home, too. When it does, you call the police. When it happens to your digital home, you track it to some other country, then call their police who will do nothing about it.
(I do host stuff at home, but I don't think it is good to understate the risks)
Of course, now we like things a little more content focused, but the point still stands, what people need is free or cheap cloud hosting with zero sysadmin work, just pure edit some pages and then have people see them, ideally with some builtin web ring type discovery features.
Any amount of tech work repels anyone other than the tinkerers who don't mind tech that needs maintenance. Usually that means all the content is just about web tech, specifically how much they hate modern bloated stuff.
Also, remember, proboards forums were almost was much of a defining element as personal sites, and were every bit as personal and indie.
Give us forums where you can set per-thread and post custom themes, hyperlink between posts, show threads in a one post at a time mode, lock threads to just you and friends, and filter posts in a thread by tag, and you're probably most of the way there to an accessible indie web.
Markdown + CSS is probably enough for almost all users.
Add the ability to import and export threads and move them to another server if needed, and
If you want interactive content, provide some sandboxed prefab options, like a Gameboy emulator you can make roms for on GB studio and attach to posts, or just give every use a subdomain for arbitrary files they can put into iframes, GitHub.io style.
The sandbox attribute is in 98% of browsers, maybe there's a way to just block the other 2% from seeing iframes, to be fully safe.
I'm surprised no-one's mentioned neocities ( https://neocities.org/ ). It's open source ( https://github.com/neocities ).
Try https://getpublii.com/ Host on Netlify for free. Zero server headaches.