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

Always Own Your Platform (2019)

alwaysownyourplatform.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 190 posts

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#71

Post by tomjakubowski »

heywoodlh wrote: post #42
neoromantique wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having CF handle your CDN proxying is still much better than just using some all in one platform. At least you own your data and can migrate it if need be.

I absolutely agree -- I was just using that as an example of how subjective "owning your own platform" is. EDIT: I originally said "owning your own content" but "owning your own platform" is more in line with what I am talking about

I don't think the CDN qualifies as a "platform" because, I think almost by definition, a platform is something that's hard to move your application off of. It's relatively painless to switch your app's CDN provider compared to, say, moving it between AWS/DigitalOcean/Azure.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#72

Post by r00tanon »

I agree with the sentiment of this post, but also agree that self-hosting in a scalable, and secure way is challenging.

Another thing that is challenging is the corporate security, often augmented by Google, applied to domain names that often results in your site getting blacklisted through no fault of your own. Just try getting those flags removed if your ISP becomes persona non grata.

There are so many options now to have a "mostly owned by you" platform while taking advantage of cloud services. Just need to do the pros and cons and choose wisely.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#73

Post by ngcc_hk »

Not everyone. And that is the issue. If everyone invent or keep his wheels, who are going to fly?

And if you do, keep your option open like apple always have their system on 3 platforms and I suspect they might even have a linux option or fpga or five…

You never really own your platform. Just partially.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#74

Post by dwheeler »

I prefer a variant of this: own your domain name and make it easy to move.

I don't think everyone has to run their own server. It's fine to pay someone or use a free service. The issue is, can you change who hosts it? If you can, you are in control.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#75

Post by FormerBandmate »

Method-X wrote: post #65
bumper_crop wrote: post #31

From 2006 to 2014 I owned my own platform. Several actually. But I turned them down after it became a lot of work to maintain. At the time, it wasn't so obvious the web was dying, but in hindsight I probably helped kill it. In the beginning the web was so new, and growing so fast, with new things, amazing sites, and more people getting online. Like all things in life, competition arises, and better sites started gett…

For most regular non-tech people this is true. I think it’s best to control your own platform but you can still leverage Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc to grow your brand and make sure they’re onboarded to your own platform of sorts.

Videos on YouTube will get 800x more views than views on yourownvideowebsite.com (assuming you aren’t a major Hollywood studio). Donald Trump went from 90 million followers on Twitter to 3.2 million followers on his own Twitter clone, and he has such a loyal following that people literally committed treason for him. Network effects are impossible to ignore

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#76

Post by generalk »

Arathorn wrote: post #70
lancesells wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. But I do think Mastodon and Matrix / Element all have a marketing problem. It's seems to be "here's a clone of a service you use but you own your content". I'm not saying that they don't do things better but they don't market it that way. To beat Twitter be better than Twitter. Make something memorable and unique, give features that beat the stockholder driven choices of the other guys.

Element (on Matrix) may be superficially a clone of slack or discord, but it already does some things significantly better: * End-to-end encryption * Spaces as freeform hierarchies of rooms * Widgets, to embed arbitrary webapps into your chatrooms * Open standard API However, the point is more that Matrix can do way more than this given it’s a protocol: Element Call is already a better UX for conferencing than Hangou…

Definitely, better marketing around differentiation.

I'm a huge dork for open standards, I frequently miss the days of Gaim/Pidgin and having Google Talk be Jabber/XMPP underneath, and being able to IM my friends wherever. Personally, I'm probably going to dork around with Matrix/Element because it sounds like my kind of thing.

But I can't figure why I'd switch to it for work.

I moved my company recently from Teams to Mattermost. The UX was the biggest selling point. Collaboration happens in Mattermost in ways it simply couldn't happen in Teams.

Putting aside the fact that we're not going to churn company comms every quarter for funzies, why would I switch us to Element? What can I do with Element that I can't do with Mattermost or Rocket.Chat or Slack or anything else?

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#78

Post by webmaven »

heywoodlh wrote: post #23

> Distribute [your content] via methods you control. I'm being nitpicky but it feels off to me to call people out on owning their own platform but then use Cloudflare's CDN instead of running their own. And if they did run their own CDN, they would probably have to use AWS or another worldwide cloud provider and not own the hardware. And if I were Richard Stallman I would probably come down on you for using proprieta…

> I'm being nitpicky but it feels off to me to call people out on owning their own platform but then use Cloudflare's CDN instead of running their own.

Infrastructure isn't a platform, and vice versa. If Cloudflare started to make editorial decisions about which web traffic to "promote" to users, there would be hell to pay.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#79

Post by nvr219 »

Hosting your own LAMP server is one thing, but I have been touching computers for 30 years and I still would not trust myself to to roll my own ecommerce anything. It sucks but I'll always outsource with shopify/paypal/patreon/whatever.

Re: Always Own Your Platform (2019)

#80

Post by rd07 »

I used to have my own blog with my own domain from 2009-2012. The increasing popularity of Facebook in my country and the waning of my passion for writing blog post, make me abandon it. Currently I still have a blog in a couple of blogging platforms, but they are unmaintained and it has been a long time since the last time I wrote there.

Personally, I want it to go back to how it was before. I want to start a new blog with my own domain. But I don't know if I can write again like it used to be.

Post reply on HN