Hosting is the easy problem. The main problem is the discoverability on the users end. Individual websites just don't show up on Google anymore, worse yet, even if you find one you like, your browser provides no tools to keep track of it. Bookmarks are completely static, they don't inform you when a site changes. While RSS exists, it fails to integrate with the Web, it's basically its own separate thing, requiring separate sites and clients. It no longer has any browser integration either.
People might not like social media, but the ability to discover content on there and keep track of it is just lightyears ahead of the regular old Web.
Another big problem is the permanence of the content. Hosting your own content today is easy. Ensuring that it is still online 20 years from now is hard. Worse yet, even if you maintain your site, URLs still change over time, links break. An IndieWeb build with regular Web tools is just going to be a lot of 404 and "DNS address could not be found".
We've been there, done that. It doesn't work. There is no point in trying to repeat it without some key innovation.
I was building packet schlepping hardware for Nortel from 99-02; I know “how the internet works”.
I was suggesting a change in social norms not technical.
There’s no reason I need all the engineering of Facebook to directly share with a few friends and family. And having seen one social site after another fill up with more noise than signal, there’s little value in engineering sorting algorithms that attempt to preserve context rummaging through it all looking for needles in haystacks (ML).
Feynman suggested modeling things literally is an inefficient path to discovery. Physicists achieved their best results dispensing with imagining the world as literal pulleys and levers and weights. We don’t need to literally model how to sort it all, just the right amount to assist others.
Software engineers need to pivot from sorting stupid meme posts and put those brains on truly interesting ideas: https://youtu.be/ZSddchIGNG0
From what you're saying it sounds like what we need is a search engine for indie sites. There's already one for old-school sites but this would work better as a directory type of deal (or webring) of old times where the sites would still be crawled and indexed so the content is fresh. One of your requirements was never a requirement for the big web either. Namely that sites are up 20 years later. I don't think that's necessarily a problem.
The main engine for discoverability for small Indy sites is google, and google lost the fight against seo spam sometime in the last 5 years. Independent sites are hard to find now, so you have to promote them via the closed networks (at least, the ones that allow you to link outside themselves — many do not, or they restrict it)
I spend extra for a business connection. It's not for everyone, but if self-hosting is important to you it adds some assurance of reliability (and a static IP!)
I can think of several good reasons to self host from your own home. Then again, those reasons are tangential to the core notion of self-publishing / independently publishing on the Web.
There are two key goals here. First, being in full control of what you can put online and in which form. Second, being able to take whatever you've put online and move ship if you have/want to. Owning a domain name and having access to a VPS or shared hosting are great first steps.
Even so, you're still relying on someone else to host your content for you. Depending on how much stock / trust you are willing to put in someone else's intentions and abilities - present and future - you may want to consider self-hosting on hardware you own. The trade-off being that you'll have to put your confidence in your own abilities, resources and skills. Which isn't a trade-off many people wouldn't necessarily be willing to make.
As for the article. When it comes to the rise of social media over the past 15-20 years, well, Eternal September happened. The vast majority of modern-day influencers aren't interested in tinkering and self-hosting. They just took the opportunity of a platform which offered free - albeit limited - tools to share content with a growing audience. More content and a growing audience, in turn, attracted more people. Arguably, the vast majority of people today would have never really entered into massive online communities if it weren't for big tech, social media, cheap internet connections and cheap mobile devices.
Sure, social media has eclipsed the, comparatively small, web of independent blogs and bloggers such as it was back in the mid-00s. That period of time is never going to come back. Despite all their flaws, vast social media networks aren't going to disappear either. Independent Web publishing may see a modest renaissance today with new protocols, the Fediverse and dirt cheap hosting. Then again, from a sociological perspective: the notion of online identity has always been evolving and has become ever more complex and fluid. People don't exclusively turn to one tool or one platform: they own several identities across many domains, platforms, accounts,... Age, social-economic background, culture, personality traits, peers,... are all deciding factors as to how people manifest that identity. In turn, collectively, this drives how the Web itself keeps evolving and morphing into something new in the future, which may or may not put a bigger focus on self publishing.
Even if you don't have those problems how do you deal with petty individuals who don't like what you have to say? A residential ISP would drop you in a heartbeat, especially if you're violating the boilerplate hosting clause in your contract.
not really. you can get a very cheap VPS and reverse proxy via a wireguard, ssh, or stunnel connection. just make the home side connect to the server side.
For people thinking this way, I say: look at your actual available bandwidth, processing power and requirements to figure out what the bottleneck will be and whether it’ll matter.
If you have a 10 Mbps uplink and an average page size of 1 MB, that’s approximately one visitor per second before it becomes saturated. Ten visitors at once will find the page takes ten seconds to load instead of one. A hundred, a hundred, though by then many will give up and you may want more deliberate load management or shedding (either limiting the number of connections you’re willing to open at a time and delaying accepting new connections, or returning a brief response that says “sorry, too much load right now, try again a bit later”, or dropping some connections outright).
But if you have a 100 Mbps uplink and serve simple content with no images, you might have an average page size of 20 KB, and then you could handle over 500 page loads per second, which is almost certainly several orders of magnitude more than you get (that’s a billion page loads per month). But at 500 per second, that means you can only spend 2ms of processing power (all cores, so with perfect parallelism the single-core CPU time available will be 2ms times the number of cores you have) per page served before processing power becomes the bottleneck.
For $5/mo, you can have your site professionally hosted with quotas high enough to cover the needs of the vast majority of people. If you get into the habit of editing your site on a "real copy" on your machine at home, and copy it from there to the professionally hosted site, you're still very resistant to being deplatformed. You just hire a different host, upload your real copy there, and change where your domain name points.
Why should it? If it's a small personal site, you may be getting maybe a hundred hits a month at most unless it gets popular or featured on a link aggregator.
I've recently found that GitHub pages + Vitepress (or similar) are an excellent way to host a static site. You can write articles in markdown, push them to your repo, and within a few seconds it deploys the updated HTML to your site. GitHub pages is totally free hosting that can handle high traffic, Vitepress looks great and has a ton of plugins, AFAIK they'll only remove content if it infringes on copyrights and/or trademarks, and you can set up custom DNS and have your own domain. This all requires some basic coding skills, but could also be easily toolified if anybody here felt inclined to make it available to non-technical people.
Bridgy is not new. I used to use it to publish my old blog site's posts to destinations like Facebook and other silos back in the day...and it worked wonderfully amazing!!! I've not used it in a couple of years (since i killed off my blog), and back then while the Fediverse existed, mastodon software was not yet around....so not sure how good it connects with mastodon instances....but overall, Snarfed's code is rock solid. If its anything like it was back in the day, then it should be great for more recent stuff. Try it, and see!
Disclaimer: For what its worth, I do not personally know Snarfed (Bridgy's main author), but i have followed him for years, and as stated above, have used his code in the past to great success.
I don't see anyone mention affiliate links when talking about the indie/old web. Affiliate links were such a crucial element to the early web 'surfing' experience. It's a pretty shitty web without those affiliate links, IMO, and the only means of discovery is generally through some giant platform.
Ah in the olden days, quite a few hobbyist sites used to maintain a link of other recommended sites in the same niche in the sidebar, with the idea being that if you like the site you're reading, you'll probably enjoy these other sites too.
This made them a very easy way to find new sites and communities, especially in fandoms like the ones for the Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, etc.
You can see a working example in the right column of this longtime Pokemon site:
I would define "indie web" very briefly as a few things:
- The indie *WEB* is a bunch of websites that leverage techniques (and yes, maybe open source software) to empower their site owners to be, well, more independent to publish their content (no reliance or less reliance) from silos like Facebook, etc. This is not the same but akin to how there is the Fediverse for social media, etc. Not so different from "indie musician", these are just websites that are "indie" (i.e. "indie" from the corporate silos).
- Then, there are techniques that are used to be independent. That wiki website you likely stumbled upon, details lots of techniques, references software that can be used for your website, as well as tons of links to other documentaion and general references that can help. One essential technique - or maybe *approach* is a better word - would be "POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. See this page for its definition, and context: https://indieweb.org/POSSE I have found that over the years, folks wishing to homestead their content on websites that they control, starting with the concept of POSSE helps to consumne the ideas behind the "indie web".
I should add that the indie web and the fediverse (of which the mastodon software has recently seen some limelight due to the twitter migration) are not new efforts. The Fediverse has been around since like 2008, while the indie web - though, more recent - is still happyily being used by people on the web for many years.
Readit News
Web apps are not programming but dependency management these days.
Making a private tribal bubble online is easier than ever. ooh he said the quiet part out loud
People might not like social media, but the ability to discover content on there and keep track of it is just lightyears ahead of the regular old Web.
Another big problem is the permanence of the content. Hosting your own content today is easy. Ensuring that it is still online 20 years from now is hard. Worse yet, even if you maintain your site, URLs still change over time, links break. An IndieWeb build with regular Web tools is just going to be a lot of 404 and "DNS address could not be found".
We've been there, done that. It doesn't work. There is no point in trying to repeat it without some key innovation.
The main problem is harassment, spam, maintenance & op cost and DDoS
I was suggesting a change in social norms not technical.
There’s no reason I need all the engineering of Facebook to directly share with a few friends and family. And having seen one social site after another fill up with more noise than signal, there’s little value in engineering sorting algorithms that attempt to preserve context rummaging through it all looking for needles in haystacks (ML).
Feynman suggested modeling things literally is an inefficient path to discovery. Physicists achieved their best results dispensing with imagining the world as literal pulleys and levers and weights. We don’t need to literally model how to sort it all, just the right amount to assist others.
Software engineers need to pivot from sorting stupid meme posts and put those brains on truly interesting ideas: https://youtu.be/ZSddchIGNG0
That requires an ISP that allows incoming connections, and preferably a static IP address. These are both increasingly uncommon.
Not if you can afford a cheap VPS to tunnel the traffic through with WireGuard or another solution. Here's my vague blog post on the topic: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-publicly-access-you...
For example, along the lines of https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ or whatever is the cheapest plan that your provider offers, or something you can find on LowEndBox: https://lowendbox.com/
Though some people also suggested Cloudflare Tunnel or similar solutions, like: https://eddiez.me/working-around-cgnat/
There are two key goals here. First, being in full control of what you can put online and in which form. Second, being able to take whatever you've put online and move ship if you have/want to. Owning a domain name and having access to a VPS or shared hosting are great first steps.
Even so, you're still relying on someone else to host your content for you. Depending on how much stock / trust you are willing to put in someone else's intentions and abilities - present and future - you may want to consider self-hosting on hardware you own. The trade-off being that you'll have to put your confidence in your own abilities, resources and skills. Which isn't a trade-off many people wouldn't necessarily be willing to make.
As for the article. When it comes to the rise of social media over the past 15-20 years, well, Eternal September happened. The vast majority of modern-day influencers aren't interested in tinkering and self-hosting. They just took the opportunity of a platform which offered free - albeit limited - tools to share content with a growing audience. More content and a growing audience, in turn, attracted more people. Arguably, the vast majority of people today would have never really entered into massive online communities if it weren't for big tech, social media, cheap internet connections and cheap mobile devices.
Sure, social media has eclipsed the, comparatively small, web of independent blogs and bloggers such as it was back in the mid-00s. That period of time is never going to come back. Despite all their flaws, vast social media networks aren't going to disappear either. Independent Web publishing may see a modest renaissance today with new protocols, the Fediverse and dirt cheap hosting. Then again, from a sociological perspective: the notion of online identity has always been evolving and has become ever more complex and fluid. People don't exclusively turn to one tool or one platform: they own several identities across many domains, platforms, accounts,... Age, social-economic background, culture, personality traits, peers,... are all deciding factors as to how people manifest that identity. In turn, collectively, this drives how the Web itself keeps evolving and morphing into something new in the future, which may or may not put a bigger focus on self publishing.
too much work? use tailscale.
No need for such cruft. My site ran off a single darkhttpd binary for many years (it's now served from S3)
If you have a 10 Mbps uplink and an average page size of 1 MB, that’s approximately one visitor per second before it becomes saturated. Ten visitors at once will find the page takes ten seconds to load instead of one. A hundred, a hundred, though by then many will give up and you may want more deliberate load management or shedding (either limiting the number of connections you’re willing to open at a time and delaying accepting new connections, or returning a brief response that says “sorry, too much load right now, try again a bit later”, or dropping some connections outright).
But if you have a 100 Mbps uplink and serve simple content with no images, you might have an average page size of 20 KB, and then you could handle over 500 page loads per second, which is almost certainly several orders of magnitude more than you get (that’s a billion page loads per month). But at 500 per second, that means you can only spend 2ms of processing power (all cores, so with perfect parallelism the single-core CPU time available will be 2ms times the number of cores you have) per page served before processing power becomes the bottleneck.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...
Here you go:
https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
https://web.archive.org/web/19970610013543/http://www.cybers...
Disclaimer: For what its worth, I do not personally know Snarfed (Bridgy's main author), but i have followed him for years, and as stated above, have used his code in the past to great success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_page
Or maybe they meant webrings?
This made them a very easy way to find new sites and communities, especially in fandoms like the ones for the Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, etc.
You can see a working example in the right column of this longtime Pokemon site:
https://www.dragonflycave.com/
With all those tiny buttons and what not.
Their website seems like a MediaWiki instance.
Is it a software? A network of websites? A service? I cannot tell from the page and I am staring at it
MediaWiki is nice I guess (but kind of crap to maintain) but that’s not really it right?
- The indie *WEB* is a bunch of websites that leverage techniques (and yes, maybe open source software) to empower their site owners to be, well, more independent to publish their content (no reliance or less reliance) from silos like Facebook, etc. This is not the same but akin to how there is the Fediverse for social media, etc. Not so different from "indie musician", these are just websites that are "indie" (i.e. "indie" from the corporate silos).
- Then, there are techniques that are used to be independent. That wiki website you likely stumbled upon, details lots of techniques, references software that can be used for your website, as well as tons of links to other documentaion and general references that can help. One essential technique - or maybe *approach* is a better word - would be "POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. See this page for its definition, and context: https://indieweb.org/POSSE I have found that over the years, folks wishing to homestead their content on websites that they control, starting with the concept of POSSE helps to consumne the ideas behind the "indie web".
I should add that the indie web and the fediverse (of which the mastodon software has recently seen some limelight due to the twitter migration) are not new efforts. The Fediverse has been around since like 2008, while the indie web - though, more recent - is still happyily being used by people on the web for many years.