Off topic: this was posted and reposted four times in 2019 in a burst of three in March and two in June. The only one which hit was June 10, 2019. Well, as they say, second to last try is the charm.
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 getting much more of the market share. People's expectations for what a website could offer rose tremendously, and would abandon a site if it wasn't up to snuff. Sites needed to have ever improving visuals, better content, better people, better interactivity, better everything.
And I couldn't keep up with it. Users went from being happy to try out something new to dismissive and bitter. More and more it felt like work to try to make them happy, to keep building more and better things. And that's exactly what happened. The Internet became work. It's why we all have to be paid to come to work and build the Internet. No one does it for free, because it's a thankless grueling job. The only websites that survived were the ones that made money, and could afford to use that money to hire people. Google, Facebook, Myspace, Stumbleupon, 9gag, and even Something Awful became money oriented rather than community oriented. They had to, or else.
The advice to "Always Own Your Own Platform" is a euphemistic way of saying make a whole company out of your site and underpay the only employee (you) for ever. The reason we don't own our own platform anymore is because it's soooo annoying to do so. It wasn't an accident.
While the damage is severe, I don't think it's permanent. Mastodon is far from a powerhouse, but is chugging along happily with a slowly growing user base. Matrix arrived just in time to help prevent Slack and Discord from becoming the defacto real-time communication systems for open source projects. Even SA is starting to heal now that it's out from under lowtax and his bullshit.
One thing I'd be curious to know is how large the current open platforms are compared to those of 20+ years ago. The internet as a whole is so much bigger that it's hard to maintain a sense of scale.
For example, how many people are using Matrix now, compared to IRC 20 years ago? IRC had 10M users in 2003 [1], Matrix has 28M 'global visible accounts', but who knows what that means.
Maybe it's ok for these platforms to remain 'small', growing slowly. Sure we'd all love to win the fight for a free internet tomorrow, but it's also important to maintain a realistic perspective.
Disclaimer: Usenet is still growing, but I presume that's just alt.binary - According to Wikipedia [1] it had 15M daily posts in 2010, and 171M daily posts in 2021.
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.
It's funny because you could argue that slack and discord replaced IRC. I wonder if we will have cycles or if commercial hosted solutions will always win this arms race.
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.
Well, yes, if that is what you want to do. If you just want to be you online, and not 'grow a brand' it is best having a platform where you are in more control of doing so than these corporate advertising platforms that are indeed tailored to building brands.
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
> 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 proprietary chipsets in your hardware instead of totally open source hardware. And you can just keep going deeper and deeper with this train of thought. So what level of ownership is acceptable to this website's author? I feel like the right balance of "ownership" is super subjective.
I love a lot of traits of the "old-school" web and am a huge believer in self-hosting as much as possible. But imo yelling at people while on your high horse doesn't encourage anyone.
Unless you are using Cloudflare's specialized security services, CDN is pretty interchangeable and easy to switch between. You can ever do dynamic DNS things to use multiple CDNs at the same time and shift different traffic segments onto different providers if you are into that sort of things, or tier one CDN behind another to act as a mid tier.
I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on CDNs because they will be very required if they ever get their way since by definition, if everyone is running small to medium, highly distributed sites, then you aren't likely to have a point of presence near most users and that will be poor user experience.
My guess is that most people have only heard of Akamai or Cloudflare so they automatically associate CDN with huge companies, but the reality is that the CDN space is highly competitive and decentralized. Just off the top of my head there's at least a dozen providers I would consider tier 1, several dozen I would classify as medium sized or targeted at niche audiences, and probably hundreds of small providers, not to mention just about every large telco operates their own CDN now.
In other words, CDN isn't a platform, it's a service. Consume services, but own your platform. Cloudflare's not going to shut your web presence down because you're "competing" with them or just plain doing something they don't like. YouTube or Apple absolutely will.
> I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on CDNs
Personally, although i'm not dogmatic about it, i'm rather opposed to CDNs for two reasons:
1) For performance reasons: unless you're distributing video, removing bloat from your webpage makes it faster to load from anywhere (including bad connection on the other side of the world) than to add a CDN on top ; i've already got a TCP route to your server so if you stay under 1MB that's much faster than to resolve a new domain and open a new route
2) For security reasons: CDNs are often used to distribute scripts, which are the #1 entrypoint for infecting users with malware. Also, as you pointed out, "anti-DDOS" reverse-proxies like CloudFlare are yet another case and should not be used in 99.99% of cases, because TLS will be terminated on their side and they can read all your users passwords!
I believe the web would be a much better place if content was served from a single origin (i believe it was not done originally because most of us didn't have enough bandwidth to consider the option). For shared content across origins, there's much better solutions than CDNs in the form of Content-Addressed Storage (eg. Bittorrent/IPFS/DAT). Whether you download it from a single trusted source (eg. your ISP), or in a p2p fashion is your choice... but a location-addressed protocol like HTTP is not well-suited for distributing static content across the world.
If only browser vendors (read: Google) were not too busy destroying our URL bars or inventing new tracking systems for advertisements that would be a fixed problem by now. But no, who needs reliable content distribution for smaller websites when you can have WebGL and a Battery API to better track users and make it harder for competitors to implement browsers?! I guess it also doesn't help that Google who develops for ~90% market share is the biggest 3rd party origin today with Google Fonts, Google Analytics, Firebase, etc.
Cloudflare serve something like 12% of the entire web don't they? That's more than enough to be worrying even if they theoretically have some competition.
> I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on CDNs
For sure, I was just using it as an example on how subjective "owning your platform" can be.
I actually have zero problems with Cloudflare, CDNs, etc. If I did have a problem with it and you disagreed, wouldn't that still illustrate my point that "ownership" is subjective and opinionated?
> I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on CDNs
+1,000,000 here. CDNs are exactly a mechanism for distributing content around the world in order to serve users locally. It's exactly decentralization! And, as you point out, the industry harbors healthy competition.
Just like security, you settle for the risk you can afford and are comfortable with.
The cloud muddies your grasp of the risks though. A lot of these cloud offerings (like k8s) are incredibly complex, and therefore have a lot of attack vectors, and a lot of points of failure. We depend on layers built on layers, built on layers. You can't really eliminate all of these dependencies, but you can eliminate / reduce some of the highest risk ones (topmost layers).
> Just like security, you settle for the risk you can afford and are comfortable with
Right, I totally agree. What I'm not a fan of is this site actively encouraging people to call out others for not owning their own content. If we are gonna compare to security, it would be like suggesting everyone should adhere to the same threat model -- which just isn't practical.
> The cloud muddies your grasp of the risks though.
Are you saying "you" generally or me specifically? Because I was just using a CDN built on AWS as an example of not being able to own all parts of your stack. It's mostly impossible for an individual and most companies to build a CDN on their own hardware as most entities don't have datacenters around the world.
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.
Not just the data, but the infrastructure as well. A CDN lets me host on my own equipment rather than renting cloud compute - and I can change CDN providers anytime I like.
The day cloudflare starts filtering individual pieces of content, I would get out fast. FB, twitter, et. al. show me what they think will keep me looking at them for as long as possible. It is only coincidence that it is sometimes content I actually want.
If I can get all my friends to just post by RSS I don’t need or want anything else those platforms do.
How are you defining "filtering individual pieces of content"? Cloudflare kicked off The Daily Stormer and acknowledged that they were doing so as their own choice for political reasons.
Sure, I agree. I actually have no problems with Cloudflare, CDNs, etc. I was just using the website's use of Cloudflare CDN as an example that "owning" your "platform" is subjective to everyone's personal experience and values. And I have a problem that the site encourages people to call out others who don't line up with their view of what owning the platform means to them.
But you don't actually need a CDN unless you're optimizing / min-maxing for speed; someone's leftover raspberry pi running in a broom closet halfway across the world can serve a website just as well as an AWS cluster can.
Of course, if you get bigger you need to start making some concessions, but for a lot of people that's wishful thinking.
I remember when I was 16, there were these guys that made really shitty voiceovers and edits for videos and put them online. They just had a computer running at home. It'd get hammered whenever they uploaded a new video, but it worked. They didn't rely on anyone else - hell, this was before youtube was a thing.
I think hosting a website in a low powered computer like Raspberry Pi can be an alternative to really own our platform. Granted, it can't handle big traffic, but it is cheap enough to built and maintain yourself.
A light weight site run on a traditional web host is fine for most use cases early on in my opinion. The problem is so many people think of costly cloud hosting as the first move and burn up all their capital even before they reach 10k users.
That is why the dot com era was more fruitful. People started in their basement, and service outages were not a big deal... Heck, service outages were often the thing that spurred more interest in products and also spurred users to invest so that products could scale.
Totally agreed. And what you said is in-line with my original thought that "owning" your "platform" is super subjective and opinionated. Some people think that infrastructure is part of your platform and some don't!
> 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.
> Infrastructure isn't a platform, and vice versa.
I gave this some thought and after a bit I disagree with this.
Wasn't Parler an example of infrastructure being used to editorialize _against_ specific opinions and ideas?[1] As I understand it, they were kicked off of AWS and refused by multiple infrastructure providers for hosting content that was perceived as offensive and potentially dangerous. Is that not an example of infrastructure being part of the platform?
*I want to make clear I do not use Parler at all and am in no way stating I am either for or against it -- I just think it's an interesting example.
I would love to hear your perspective, though, on that.
To clarify, though, my original point is that "owning" your "platform" is subject to your values and experience. Do you agree with that? I actually have zero problems with anyone using Cloudflare, CDNs, etc, I just think it feels self righteous to encourage people to call out others for not owning their own content (which the original website does).
Good point about content and licensing. It is discouraging to understand that in most cases when people post content it isn't theirs anymore despite them taking the time to create it.
Really hard for non-techies; even a hosted WordPress isn't easy to use. I've been asked a few times 'I want to write online, what do I do?' and it's hard to find easy to use answers that don't involve vendor lock-in. Or me having to provide support forever.
SSGs with plain text files are brilliant once you are set up, but it's a big hurdle getting there.
Best I can do is try to find platforms with sane exit strategies.
> SSGs with plain text files are brilliant once you are set up, but it's a big hurdle getting there.
Even in that case, not nearly as practical, unless you mostly do long-form and only post from your computer. Even with SSG set up, having to be on the computer to create a draft, or make a quick correction, is really a bother.
Also, when you own everything, you end up spending more time tinkering with it, which is not bad per se if you are having fun, but terrible if your goal is to actually post. Those 2 things - harder to post and easier to get sidetracked - explains why so many SSG'd blogs are made up of a few posts explaining why and how it was set up, and maybe a couple actual posts.
> Even with SSG set up, having to be on the computer to create a draft, or make a quick correction, is really a bother.
I think you might be able to solve this with Syncthing and a watch process on your syncthing server. Commit and render on each change, and optionally sync if the rendered site is different from the previous version.
May be worth considering: Lightweight ActivityPub writing platform, straightforward to self-host but there are also managed hosts: https://writefreely.org/
Installing and managing anything computer related is so hard these days. Take programming for example.
I started many years ago on C. I could literally copy a compiler executable out of an archive and it's ready to go.
PHP was an apt install command. Want to use it on the web or with a database? A couple of more install commands. Guides were simple to follow, and they worked.
I'm trying to install Python for my daughter, and f me it's like pulling teeth.
The official installer is apparently the wrong way, you should use xyz package manager. The guides that people recommend just don't work, weird errors show up. Searching online leads to others with similar problems, but the always recommended guides are never updated. It's frustrating spending an hour fixing one error message, then another pops up. All I want is to install the damn thing.
I've worked as a software engineer and as a documentation writer, and I struggle to deal with this stuff. Nothing just works, even a simple website now is a massiveness stack of stuff that breaks for weird reasons and is really hard to diagnose if you don't deal with it all the time.
Right now I'm trying to set up Unity3d to build to iPhone... It's like researching an arcane magical spell. There seems to be no clear guide to how things are supposed to be set up. I'm now watching bloody YouTube videos on it, and despite following the exact same steps using the same software versions suddenly they have settings I don't, where did they come from who knows. It's never explained and you end up trawling through forums to find the nugget that explains exactly what thing you have to do.
Python isn't a special case either, same issue with node, php/composer, R, and many others. I pretty much do this for a living now, it seems like most of my skillset is figuring out how things should run without making too much of a mess.
Drupal has been solid. It needs a good developer who knows how to architect it properly so that it endures.
Wordpress has been overrun by paid modules, which contradicts most of the benefits of it being open source. It also has had far too many security breakdowns. Paid modules are also now developed on Wordpress to break on updates, the eco-system at Wordpress needs serious attention.
I mean "just learn HTML and upload it" will always work, you can provide them with a simple template as well if needs be (e.g. http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ ), but they would also need to learn FTP or its equivalent built into their file browser.
But I'd argue those are easier than wordpress itself. Plus, WP is quite invasive in that it will do its own updates, and most plugins try to push some paid services as well.
I'm sure there's more minimalist WP alternatives though.
What about a blogging platform that runs as a self-contained single page application (minimal) that gets its contents from text files? I'm sure it exists somewhere.
I think there are SSG front-ends that are quite good.
I find that writing in HTML is fiddly for regular blogging but I do agree it's a lower barrier to entry than it seems for simply writing a single page.
When I show people my text-file SSG system, they love writing in markdown, they love that the site is 'portable', but they don't tend to want to get involved with the templating etc.
So, the eternal "You can host your stuff in your basement" vs. "No, not everyone can host their stuff, it's hard".
Here's (hopefully) some food for thought on how a decentralized web could work in an ideal world in the future.
The problem is, even if you sell amazing shiny turn-key server boxes to every household, where they would be able to seamlessly host everything they currently keep elsewhere (iCloud, Facebook, etc.); even if messaging and other communication becomes absolute P2P in the whole world and therefore there's no need for centralized messaging services —
— there would still be the problem of centralized search. The beauty of Internet is not in its content as much as in the ability to discover it. Search implies there has to be a central place where you start it. This is why everyone - techies or not - tend to push their creations to places that provide exposure and discoverability: Medium, SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Then all that is additionally indexed by a meta-engine that is Google today. Centralization upon centralization.
I think there might be a solution to this which would be a mix of P2P and locally centralized services. Imagine a gigantic balanced tree of indexing engines that belong, say, to communities. Whenever someone performs a search anywhere in the world, the query is propagated through the tree and is processed in a parallel manner by a great many nodes at once. I'm not sure about the exact algorithm right now, but something suggests Google probably works this way anyway. Except in this ideal world, the search engine doesn't belong to a single authority, but is rather split into myriads of local services maintained by (and paid for) by the communities or some small local companies.
If you think it would be wasteful and traffic-heavy, think of the resources and bandwidth that might be freed if Google, Facebook and other giants were replaced by this highly decentralized system, which, again, would work pretty much like the incumbents do, except data would belong to and be hosted by individuals who created it, and search would be one giant brain with potentially millions of cells that perform queries in parallel.
How far fetched is this? Very :) But at least I hope the idea is thought provoking.
> Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube entice us to give them our creative work. It's time to take it back ... Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself.
So, youtube, right? Where would you host your videos if you had a mind to take them back?
There's only really one set of codecs that works across all devices. Video Player libraries that work really well with features like captions/subtitles, speed controls, automatic resolution shifting are hard to find, much less if you are not technical.
If you want to cater to an audience outside the western world you'll want a video processing pipeline to downscale your videos to lower resolutions.
Ideally you'd want to chunk up the video into something like HLS playlists so navigating around the video wouldn't require someone to wait until the download caught up to the middle of the file... the list goes on.
Video is still hard. The big players make it seem easy, but it's not, in my experience, that simple.
Even if you want to use Youtube, Floatplane or others to expose your content you can still pull users back to your site and own the creator - user relationship.
Sounds cool in theory but almost impossible and impractical. For example, you can have a newsletter but google could decide your domain belongs in Spam forever. There goes that “owned platform”
From your comment you seem to think that Google somehow owns your arse. Perhaps you use them for your email and other functions and fail to see over the top of their walled garden?
There is no doubt that Google largely own Search and several other functions but they really don't own the internet as a whole. Often we see sad articles on HN about how the monster in the room twats someone into oblivion thanks to a stupid "AI" making a judgement call that a human would be embarrassed about. To avoid or perhaps slightly mitigate that fate is well documented hereabouts and elsewhere. For what it is worth (in my experience)
Google is not inimical on an arbitrary basis. They really don't decide anything - it's all algorithms, pixie dust and bollocks. Avoid that and you are golden.
As it turns out, I've been able to run many "local" email systems and even my own little IT company quite happily for over two decades, without giving much thought to Google. We do have a newsletter email that we send out too. Some of my customers fly quite close to the edge of the spam/ham boundary.
I operate in the UK. Bizarrely, I can quite happily run SMTP from a domestic FTTC connection here, with a little care.
What GP meant is that Google owns the email of all the people you would send mail to, and can decide that all messages from you go unseen by your recipients.
I don't think there is any fix for that except for people to deliberatively and incrementally take that power from their hands. not betting on the outcome. I guess the old real hope is that 15 years from now when google is finally no longer relevant, that smaller business and individuals diffuse that control more broadly.
The bin forever? I don't know anyone who gets their news and blog posts straight from Google search. Google can't stop you from putting up an RSS feed, sharing the link to friends, or posting it to content aggregators like HN or Reddit, which I think are far more important for building a real audience than Google search.
I interpreted the reference as being to Google's email product, not search.
As a techie (but not email expert), I have tried to run a couple small mailing lists for community projects over the years, and wound up giving up because of gmail/hotmail/etc's aggressive spam filters catching too many of our legit emails.
Facebook (Instagram) and Twitter convince you that getting followers is growth. All you're doing is donating content to them and giving them advertiser profiles so that they can sell your own audience back to you. Algorithmic timelines mean that "your" followers/subscribers see what the owners want them to see, and not the stuff from you that they explicitly subscribed to.
This website is good advice. Stop sharecropping for billionaires.
Readit News
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 getting much more of the market share. People's expectations for what a website could offer rose tremendously, and would abandon a site if it wasn't up to snuff. Sites needed to have ever improving visuals, better content, better people, better interactivity, better everything.
And I couldn't keep up with it. Users went from being happy to try out something new to dismissive and bitter. More and more it felt like work to try to make them happy, to keep building more and better things. And that's exactly what happened. The Internet became work. It's why we all have to be paid to come to work and build the Internet. No one does it for free, because it's a thankless grueling job. The only websites that survived were the ones that made money, and could afford to use that money to hire people. Google, Facebook, Myspace, Stumbleupon, 9gag, and even Something Awful became money oriented rather than community oriented. They had to, or else.
The advice to "Always Own Your Own Platform" is a euphemistic way of saying make a whole company out of your site and underpay the only employee (you) for ever. The reason we don't own our own platform anymore is because it's soooo annoying to do so. It wasn't an accident.
For example, how many people are using Matrix now, compared to IRC 20 years ago? IRC had 10M users in 2003 [1], Matrix has 28M 'global visible accounts', but who knows what that means.
Maybe it's ok for these platforms to remain 'small', growing slowly. Sure we'd all love to win the fight for a free internet tomorrow, but it's also important to maintain a realistic perspective.
Disclaimer: Usenet is still growing, but I presume that's just alt.binary - According to Wikipedia [1] it had 15M daily posts in 2010, and 171M daily posts in 2021.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
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.
Amazon.com is basic text and image elements on a white background. The full-feature sites often just look like blown up versions of the mobile sites.
I believe there are multiple issues with owning your platform but I'm not sure this is the defining factor, at least anymore.
Well, yes, if that is what you want to do. If you just want to be you online, and not 'grow a brand' it is best having a platform where you are in more control of doing so than these corporate advertising platforms that are indeed tailored to building brands.
Dead Comment
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 proprietary chipsets in your hardware instead of totally open source hardware. And you can just keep going deeper and deeper with this train of thought. So what level of ownership is acceptable to this website's author? I feel like the right balance of "ownership" is super subjective.
I love a lot of traits of the "old-school" web and am a huge believer in self-hosting as much as possible. But imo yelling at people while on your high horse doesn't encourage anyone.
I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on CDNs because they will be very required if they ever get their way since by definition, if everyone is running small to medium, highly distributed sites, then you aren't likely to have a point of presence near most users and that will be poor user experience.
My guess is that most people have only heard of Akamai or Cloudflare so they automatically associate CDN with huge companies, but the reality is that the CDN space is highly competitive and decentralized. Just off the top of my head there's at least a dozen providers I would consider tier 1, several dozen I would classify as medium sized or targeted at niche audiences, and probably hundreds of small providers, not to mention just about every large telco operates their own CDN now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network#Notab...
Personally, although i'm not dogmatic about it, i'm rather opposed to CDNs for two reasons:
1) For performance reasons: unless you're distributing video, removing bloat from your webpage makes it faster to load from anywhere (including bad connection on the other side of the world) than to add a CDN on top ; i've already got a TCP route to your server so if you stay under 1MB that's much faster than to resolve a new domain and open a new route
2) For security reasons: CDNs are often used to distribute scripts, which are the #1 entrypoint for infecting users with malware. Also, as you pointed out, "anti-DDOS" reverse-proxies like CloudFlare are yet another case and should not be used in 99.99% of cases, because TLS will be terminated on their side and they can read all your users passwords!
I believe the web would be a much better place if content was served from a single origin (i believe it was not done originally because most of us didn't have enough bandwidth to consider the option). For shared content across origins, there's much better solutions than CDNs in the form of Content-Addressed Storage (eg. Bittorrent/IPFS/DAT). Whether you download it from a single trusted source (eg. your ISP), or in a p2p fashion is your choice... but a location-addressed protocol like HTTP is not well-suited for distributing static content across the world.
If only browser vendors (read: Google) were not too busy destroying our URL bars or inventing new tracking systems for advertisements that would be a fixed problem by now. But no, who needs reliable content distribution for smaller websites when you can have WebGL and a Battery API to better track users and make it harder for competitors to implement browsers?! I guess it also doesn't help that Google who develops for ~90% market share is the biggest 3rd party origin today with Google Fonts, Google Analytics, Firebase, etc.
For sure, I was just using it as an example on how subjective "owning your platform" can be.
I actually have zero problems with Cloudflare, CDNs, etc. If I did have a problem with it and you disagreed, wouldn't that still illustrate my point that "ownership" is subjective and opinionated?
+1,000,000 here. CDNs are exactly a mechanism for distributing content around the world in order to serve users locally. It's exactly decentralization! And, as you point out, the industry harbors healthy competition.
The cloud muddies your grasp of the risks though. A lot of these cloud offerings (like k8s) are incredibly complex, and therefore have a lot of attack vectors, and a lot of points of failure. We depend on layers built on layers, built on layers. You can't really eliminate all of these dependencies, but you can eliminate / reduce some of the highest risk ones (topmost layers).
Right, I totally agree. What I'm not a fan of is this site actively encouraging people to call out others for not owning their own content. If we are gonna compare to security, it would be like suggesting everyone should adhere to the same threat model -- which just isn't practical.
> The cloud muddies your grasp of the risks though.
Are you saying "you" generally or me specifically? Because I was just using a CDN built on AWS as an example of not being able to own all parts of your stack. It's mostly impossible for an individual and most companies to build a CDN on their own hardware as most entities don't have datacenters around the world.
EDIT: I originally said "owning your own content" but "owning your own platform" is more in line with what I am talking about
Of course, if you get bigger you need to start making some concessions, but for a lot of people that's wishful thinking.
I remember when I was 16, there were these guys that made really shitty voiceovers and edits for videos and put them online. They just had a computer running at home. It'd get hammered whenever they uploaded a new video, but it worked. They didn't rely on anyone else - hell, this was before youtube was a thing.
That is why the dot com era was more fruitful. People started in their basement, and service outages were not a big deal... Heck, service outages were often the thing that spurred more interest in products and also spurred users to invest so that products could scale.
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.
I gave this some thought and after a bit I disagree with this.
Wasn't Parler an example of infrastructure being used to editorialize _against_ specific opinions and ideas?[1] As I understand it, they were kicked off of AWS and refused by multiple infrastructure providers for hosting content that was perceived as offensive and potentially dangerous. Is that not an example of infrastructure being part of the platform?
*I want to make clear I do not use Parler at all and am in no way stating I am either for or against it -- I just think it's an interesting example.
I would love to hear your perspective, though, on that.
To clarify, though, my original point is that "owning" your "platform" is subject to your values and experience. Do you agree with that? I actually have zero problems with anyone using Cloudflare, CDNs, etc, I just think it feels self righteous to encourage people to call out others for not owning their own content (which the original website does).
[1] https://time.com/5929888/amazon-parler-aws/
EDIT: forgot to add the link :)
So I see it as own your content and don't licence it out or be unprepared to migrate hosting platforms as needed.
SSGs with plain text files are brilliant once you are set up, but it's a big hurdle getting there.
Best I can do is try to find platforms with sane exit strategies.
Even in that case, not nearly as practical, unless you mostly do long-form and only post from your computer. Even with SSG set up, having to be on the computer to create a draft, or make a quick correction, is really a bother.
Also, when you own everything, you end up spending more time tinkering with it, which is not bad per se if you are having fun, but terrible if your goal is to actually post. Those 2 things - harder to post and easier to get sidetracked - explains why so many SSG'd blogs are made up of a few posts explaining why and how it was set up, and maybe a couple actual posts.
I think you might be able to solve this with Syncthing and a watch process on your syncthing server. Commit and render on each change, and optionally sync if the rendered site is different from the previous version.
...granted, that's a really tech-nerd setup.
I started many years ago on C. I could literally copy a compiler executable out of an archive and it's ready to go.
PHP was an apt install command. Want to use it on the web or with a database? A couple of more install commands. Guides were simple to follow, and they worked.
I'm trying to install Python for my daughter, and f me it's like pulling teeth.
The official installer is apparently the wrong way, you should use xyz package manager. The guides that people recommend just don't work, weird errors show up. Searching online leads to others with similar problems, but the always recommended guides are never updated. It's frustrating spending an hour fixing one error message, then another pops up. All I want is to install the damn thing.
I've worked as a software engineer and as a documentation writer, and I struggle to deal with this stuff. Nothing just works, even a simple website now is a massiveness stack of stuff that breaks for weird reasons and is really hard to diagnose if you don't deal with it all the time.
Right now I'm trying to set up Unity3d to build to iPhone... It's like researching an arcane magical spell. There seems to be no clear guide to how things are supposed to be set up. I'm now watching bloody YouTube videos on it, and despite following the exact same steps using the same software versions suddenly they have settings I don't, where did they come from who knows. It's never explained and you end up trawling through forums to find the nugget that explains exactly what thing you have to do.
Yes; but it’s not like even that many techies host their own content.
I love how Jeremy Keith copies everything he tweets to his own site [0]. Wanted to check how he set it all up; but his site isn’t open-sourced.
[0] - https://adactio.com
https://youtu.be/X3SrZuH00GQ?t=852
Wordpress has been overrun by paid modules, which contradicts most of the benefits of it being open source. It also has had far too many security breakdowns. Paid modules are also now developed on Wordpress to break on updates, the eco-system at Wordpress needs serious attention.
But I'd argue those are easier than wordpress itself. Plus, WP is quite invasive in that it will do its own updates, and most plugins try to push some paid services as well.
I'm sure there's more minimalist WP alternatives though.
What about a blogging platform that runs as a self-contained single page application (minimal) that gets its contents from text files? I'm sure it exists somewhere.
I find that writing in HTML is fiddly for regular blogging but I do agree it's a lower barrier to entry than it seems for simply writing a single page.
When I show people my text-file SSG system, they love writing in markdown, they love that the site is 'portable', but they don't tend to want to get involved with the templating etc.
Here's (hopefully) some food for thought on how a decentralized web could work in an ideal world in the future.
The problem is, even if you sell amazing shiny turn-key server boxes to every household, where they would be able to seamlessly host everything they currently keep elsewhere (iCloud, Facebook, etc.); even if messaging and other communication becomes absolute P2P in the whole world and therefore there's no need for centralized messaging services —
— there would still be the problem of centralized search. The beauty of Internet is not in its content as much as in the ability to discover it. Search implies there has to be a central place where you start it. This is why everyone - techies or not - tend to push their creations to places that provide exposure and discoverability: Medium, SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Then all that is additionally indexed by a meta-engine that is Google today. Centralization upon centralization.
I think there might be a solution to this which would be a mix of P2P and locally centralized services. Imagine a gigantic balanced tree of indexing engines that belong, say, to communities. Whenever someone performs a search anywhere in the world, the query is propagated through the tree and is processed in a parallel manner by a great many nodes at once. I'm not sure about the exact algorithm right now, but something suggests Google probably works this way anyway. Except in this ideal world, the search engine doesn't belong to a single authority, but is rather split into myriads of local services maintained by (and paid for) by the communities or some small local companies.
If you think it would be wasteful and traffic-heavy, think of the resources and bandwidth that might be freed if Google, Facebook and other giants were replaced by this highly decentralized system, which, again, would work pretty much like the incumbents do, except data would belong to and be hosted by individuals who created it, and search would be one giant brain with potentially millions of cells that perform queries in parallel.
How far fetched is this? Very :) But at least I hope the idea is thought provoking.
So, youtube, right? Where would you host your videos if you had a mind to take them back?
Youtube's value is viewers that will accidentally discover your video. Nobody will watch your videos if you publish them at your own website.
There's only really one set of codecs that works across all devices. Video Player libraries that work really well with features like captions/subtitles, speed controls, automatic resolution shifting are hard to find, much less if you are not technical.
If you want to cater to an audience outside the western world you'll want a video processing pipeline to downscale your videos to lower resolutions.
Ideally you'd want to chunk up the video into something like HLS playlists so navigating around the video wouldn't require someone to wait until the download caught up to the middle of the file... the list goes on.
Video is still hard. The big players make it seem easy, but it's not, in my experience, that simple.
Even if you want to use Youtube, Floatplane or others to expose your content you can still pull users back to your site and own the creator - user relationship.
1) set the iframe width="514" height="289" or smaller that will remove the "Watch on YouTube" link (viewers can still view in fullscreen)
2) add ?modestbranding=1 to the end of the src url, this will also remove the "YouTube" link
Then add your own comments system to your embedded page and monetize how you see fit.
Yeah, stop letting Google dictate your search results! Create your own search engine and own your platform!
There is no doubt that Google largely own Search and several other functions but they really don't own the internet as a whole. Often we see sad articles on HN about how the monster in the room twats someone into oblivion thanks to a stupid "AI" making a judgement call that a human would be embarrassed about. To avoid or perhaps slightly mitigate that fate is well documented hereabouts and elsewhere. For what it is worth (in my experience) Google is not inimical on an arbitrary basis. They really don't decide anything - it's all algorithms, pixie dust and bollocks. Avoid that and you are golden.
As it turns out, I've been able to run many "local" email systems and even my own little IT company quite happily for over two decades, without giving much thought to Google. We do have a newsletter email that we send out too. Some of my customers fly quite close to the edge of the spam/ham boundary.
I operate in the UK. Bizarrely, I can quite happily run SMTP from a domestic FTTC connection here, with a little care.
or we get google 2.0
As a techie (but not email expert), I have tried to run a couple small mailing lists for community projects over the years, and wound up giving up because of gmail/hotmail/etc's aggressive spam filters catching too many of our legit emails.
This website is good advice. Stop sharecropping for billionaires.