[HN Gopher] Let's make the web personal again
___________________________________________________________________
Let's make the web personal again
Author : abreckle
Score : 227 points
Date : 2022-11-13 14:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.nymhq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.nymhq.com)
| javajosh wrote:
| Great idea! But the problem, now, is on the client side. Readers
| need RSS. This lets authors publish at their own pace (which we
| can assume is relatively slowly) and doesn't burden the user with
| checking for new content manually. Of course, Twitter is a de
| facto RSS feed for some, and several other services (HN included)
| serve that role to some extent. But for the personal web, for
| those readers (and writers) of the web, you need RSS.
|
| The other problem is that a lot of writing is just not very good.
| Perhaps contraversially, I think that too is a tool problem: I've
| noticed that good authors take more time with their posts, get
| more feedback from more people, and even go to the trouble of
| thanking them in the post - which for very popular authors, like
| pg for example, is quite effective motivation and reward. But
| most authoring tools don't particularly encourage this behavior,
| preferring instead to give the author the least resistance
| possible to publishing.
|
| So, with either the return of Google Reader or equivalent, or the
| addition of a great RSS reader in Chrome, plus authoring tools
| that promote collaboration and revision, the personal web can
| flourish. Until then we'll have to make do with Twitter, etc for
| RSS and cobble together our own ad hoc editor networks via
| awkward emails and/or shared google docs.
| asdff wrote:
| >Until then we'll have to make do with Twitter, etc for RSS and
| cobble together our own ad hoc editor networks via awkward
| emails and/or shared google docs.
|
| Or you can use existing blogware and rss. Plenty of people do
| use rss still today. Plenty of small and major media websites
| still offer it. Every few years there's a hn thread something
| akin to "ask hn: does anyone use rss still" at which point its
| the most engaged thread on the front page, with nearly all
| replies either saying that "yes I use it every day," or even "I
| got to this very thread from an rss feed." Honestly, if you are
| a blogger and want to select a readership base that has certain
| characteristics you are interested in (maybe it overlaps with
| your stereotypical hn user: techie or in the technology
| industry with more money than the median worker), you should
| offer an rss feed to capture these readers who might not even
| bother with platforms like twitter at all.
| aikendrum wrote:
| One of two things will happen. Either someone will build a huge
| business on top of a really great RSS reader, gradually adding
| features to feeds that customise to compete with substack /
| twitter etc; until the point where regular old feeds don't work
| as well, or at all in free readers. This is the IRC to Slack
| pipeline.
|
| Or, RSS will continue as an important technology, but one
| that's sidestepped in favour of social networks.
|
| I miss the old web, blogging, deep knowledge and intellectually
| diverse voices spread and hosted widely. But it stands in
| contrast to the centralising, oligopolistic tendencies of
| capitalism, and arguably high technology itself.
| DarthNebo wrote:
| Dunno if all this banning & suppression of folks by private
| entities & governments is the push towards RSS again &/or some
| melding with IPFS
| poszlem wrote:
| It's not going to be an original take if I say that I absolutely
| adored the early internet with the personal websites everywhere.
|
| Comparing it with the internet of today it makes me think of the
| difference between a high street in a small city, full of
| different shops and cafes vs. a shopping mall, where everything
| looks the same, is loud, smelly, and obnoxious. (Of course the
| early internet had a lot of loud, smell, and obnoxious places,
| but those were much easier to avoid).
|
| I also like the idea of people hosting their own sites. It was
| IMO much easier to talk about the free speech if you were hosting
| your own website and didn't have a "connection broker" (Twitter,
| Facebook) between you and your readers. The whole argument of
| "it's a private bussines, therefore it can just kick you out"
| goes out the window (unless you want to go and moles the ISP, but
| it's easier to argue that they are just an utility provider).
| _jcrossley wrote:
| Yes please. With the "creator culture" from TikTok etc, I think
| if personal sites could be made _that_ easy and fun, they'd come
| back in fashion. Personally I'm ready for MySpace 2.0
| 13415 wrote:
| It's a standard to have a personal website, at least among my
| colleagues and generally among people I find interesting.
| codepoet80 wrote:
| Slightly OT: what framework is in use for that website? The
| responsive approach looks a lot like a modern version of Enyo
| (https://sdk.webosarchive.org/enyo2sampler/)
| superultra wrote:
| I think the flaw in this logic is that somehow it's technically
| hard to start a personal blog, so they invent a technical
| solution (a better platform). But there are plenty of great
| platforms that are easy to use, Wix, Squarespace, and
| Wordpress.com, etc.
|
| The problem isn't technical though, in my opinion, it's social.
| My working theory is that there are probably the same amount of
| people or more who were or would be vested in a so-called
| "personal web" as there were 10 or 20 years ago. But I think that
| we've all allowed ourselves to be trained that the levels of
| engagement and web visitors that we would have been happy with
| 10-20 years ago just doesn't match up to what social platforms
| can provide, so most people that _would_ have a personal blog
| just aren 't.
|
| I know my personal blog from 20 years ago, which I posted to
| daily, feels very small and quaint. I also know that I would be
| disappointed with "engagement."
|
| A more personal web doesn't really need better platforms or tech,
| it needs a mindset reset.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| To add to this, centralization has been such a big part of the
| past 20 years with Social Media that it's hard to put the genie
| back in the bottle. It has and continues to be an "and"
| proposition -> social media presence +
| "personal"/brand/corporate/? website must go hand in hand.
|
| The people who get the flywheel right get an outsized piece of
| typical mind share and opportunity.
| asdff wrote:
| I think what makes it difficult is that there's a sense that
| self hosting (or coding in general) is not going to click with
| you if you aren't already a techie. People just shut down, but
| its not their fault, that's just what marketing has told them
| for 25 years. Marketing comes in lying, saying its hard to do
| these things, that you need to pay someone to hold your hand
| and keep you safe, and doing otherwise means you are a fool,
| since they can point to their massive populations of sheep that
| already believed their lie as some sort of justification for
| why they are right. In reality, its easy to code. Its easy to
| set up self hosting. Its easy to write your own html. It
| probably takes as long for you to get up to speed with the
| basics of these things as it does for you to learn some gui
| tool that you have to pay for somehow to do a very limited set
| of these things.
|
| I think of all my accountant friends, absolute wizards in excel
| which is no easy feat, who would be able to make money hand
| over fist if they just took even less time to learn the basics
| of programming and data science than it did to get so
| proficient at excel. Unfortunately the big lie of technology
| has hit them too, and they have convinced themselves that they
| are somehow mentally unable to understand this stuff, or that
| they should have gone to school for it and now have no hope of
| ever learning it, even though their expertise in excel proves
| they are perfectly capable of learning this sort of stuff if
| they gave it a chance. It's not harder, its actually easy, 7
| year olds can wrap their head around computer code, so that
| means you can too with just a little bit of patience.
| Unfortunately patience is also in short supply these days
| thanks to marketing setting expectations that all good things
| should be instant gratification or they aren't good at all.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think you're missing the forest for the trees. You're
| right, basic coding skills are easy to learn. Much like basic
| accounting, basic DIY skills, pretty much the basics of
| anything. But not everyone finds it interesting.
|
| I have a friend who's quite technically savvy and has been on
| the net since the early '90s. He used to maintain a website
| but once social media came along, he was gone with the wind.
| I asked him recently if he ever wanted to go back to posting
| on a personal blog and he said no, he found the minutiae in
| writing content, hosting, maintaining, etc to be boring and a
| waste of time even if he was only spending 10 min a week on
| it, given that he was mostly just interested in interacting
| in small comment-like bursts on online forums. For chatting
| with known friends, he's in group chats and Discords. He just
| doesn't find the value on having a personal website. I
| suspect most people don't either.
| donatj wrote:
| Bring back webrings? They were a great easy way to stumble on
| personal sites.
| KIFulgore wrote:
| Man, I miss webrings. I could rabbit-hole down a group of sites
| about a particular interest for hours.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| Personal websites are useful tools for organizing and re-
| organizing your mind. For me, a few simple practices have been
| life-changing:
|
| 1. Keeping a public list of soon/current/recent projects forces
| me to keep priorities straight over long stretches of time.
|
| 2. Maintaining a monthly newsletter organizes my life into
| personal "sprints". It also provides a tiny community of like-
| minded people.
|
| 3. Essays supercharge reflections on deep questions. If you have
| any big ideas or strong opinions, public writing is incredible
| distillation.
|
| 4. Writing for fun is _fun_! It 's a productive craft well-suited
| to curious/obsessive minds (much like programming).
|
| ---
|
| https://taylor.town
| DustinBrett wrote:
| Totally agree as someone who has been making personal sites since
| I was a kid in '98. My latest iteration has been nearly 2 years
| in the making now. I had a WordPress blog for many years but
| finally decided it was time as a software developer to have a
| site that was custom. The core idea of the site is as if you've
| RDP'd into my Windows 10 machine and can see all my files and
| apps. Everything runs client side which was also something
| important to me. If interested please check it out, I nickname it
| daedalOS and it's also open source.
|
| https://dustinbrett.com/
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| The showcase is 3 blogs from the same guy all with limited
| content?
|
| Okay.. so someone copied Brian Lovin's blog platform and is proud
| of themselves.
| s3000 wrote:
| > Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the
| network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small
| deliberate audiences and showing it to them.
|
| Are there plans for ActivityPub integration?
| agambrahma wrote:
| IMO making "a new Wordpress" doesn't feel like a great
| alternative -- Wordpress is pretty good as it is, and you have
| the option of self-hosting fairly painlessly if you want to.
|
| The fun of late-90s website-making is real though, but I don't
| see a turn towards that for the vast majority of people.
|
| One nice corner of optimism is projects like Glitch [1], which
| give just enough space to explore, go wild, and quickly host what
| you make.
|
| [1]: https://glitch.com
| steve_john wrote:
| nunez wrote:
| If this were true, SquareSpace would be trading way higher than
| they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a
| lot like MySpace.
|
| My take: people created websites back then because there was no
| other choice. People RUSHED into MySpace when it got hot partly
| because of this.
|
| Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about
| consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or
| directors because they love TV or movies (though this is
| definitely a bigger pipeline than tech); they just want The
| Avengers or Real Housewives or whatever.
|
| I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Most people have
| non-computery interests, and that's fine.
| Affric wrote:
| Good comment. And the old web is still there but for almost 30
| years it's not been where the growth is.
|
| 99% of people don't want computers, they want computers to do
| the work of life for them so they can get on with what really
| interest them.
| nunez wrote:
| thanks! agreed.
|
| browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they
| largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still
| works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved
| on.
|
| that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it!
|
| sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100%
| the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge.
|
| The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their
| work on their phones and tablets, they would. And that is
| happening now that iDevices are becoming significantly more
| capable and microsoft seems to be throwing less weight at
| moving Windows licenses.
|
| alas, if this is true, it makes so much more sense to throw
| significant resources at making phones and tablets the best
| they can be instead of shoehorning a dying desktop experience
| into a mobile factor (something that's been tried way too
| many times before)
| fragmede wrote:
| Desktop not a dying product anymore than cars are a dying
| product. They are undergoing changes (ICE to EV) and there
| are alternatives (trains) but they're simply not going
| away. Desktop OS is for creating digital things. Phones are
| the way to digitize things that have been created outside
| of the computer. Phones don't have dual 24" monitors. Dual
| 24" monitors don't fit in your pocket. Different use cases,
| with a lot of gray area in between.
| ako wrote:
| You'll be able to connect you're mobile devices to large
| screens soon, see the M1/M2 iPads. A lot of professional
| content creation is already moving to mobile devices like
| music, 3D design, writing, painting, video shooting and
| editing, photo shooting and editing. Other professions
| are also using mobile devices for professional work like
| inspections, pilots, medical doctors, etc, etc. Soon
| (already?) more professional work will be done on mobile
| devices rather than on desktops.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| > The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do
| their work on their phones and tablets, they would.
|
| Count me out of this brave new world of tiny screens and
| crappy UI/UX.
| rchaud wrote:
| I got a Galaxy Fold and it's remarkable how much more
| 'active' work I'm doing on my phone now that I can switch
| to iPad Mini-sized dimensions and it still fits in the
| palm of my hand. The narrow screens that 99% of phone
| users have seem to adversely incentivize shallow,
| consumption-oriented usage in my case.
| ako wrote:
| With iPadOS 16.2 you'll be able to connect your M1/M2
| iPad to a big monitor via usb-c, use a Bluetooth keyboard
| and mouse, and it'll be just like using a laptop.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| Using tablets or phones doesn't necessarily mean tiny
| screens--although for the life of me, I can't understand
| why so few companies have put effort into making a phone
| with a UI that scales for regular screens. (I know they
| exist, don't sent me examples, thee point is that there
| are so few of them."
| hjgjhyuhy wrote:
| metadat wrote:
| Samsung DEX.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| That is innovation! I like scrcpy for controlling the
| phone from my desktop.
| knome wrote:
| I wish I could ignore it. It seems many web designers,
| even at major companies, don't consider PCs anymore.
|
| Google's new carousel features aren't proper links and
| don't respond to middle-clicks. If you want to pop out an
| image into its own tab you have to first click it, then
| pop it out from their more-info panel.
|
| Azure has similar problems, where listings collapse to
| nigh unusable sizes on desktop and Ctrl-f is broken
| horribly since many of their page switches actually just
| slide the current page to the left while keeping it
| loaded, so that when you go to search, the interface
| starts dragging back to hits on the previous page. Not
| that Ctrl-f really works in the face of the "only load
| just enough of the content that fits into the undersized
| box" anyway.
|
| They'll push megabytes of javascript to avoid server-side
| rendering kilobytes of source, making the whole thing
| harder to use than it needs to be.
| ekanes wrote:
| Agreed. Was quite surprised when my daughter was doing
| grade 8 math homework on her phone. Would never have
| occurred to me to try, let alone want to!
| Eupraxias wrote:
| And then there are those of us who positively REVILE the
| mobile interface. I will continue to use a non-laptop
| desktop computer until I have no choice.
|
| For me, I turn my telephone on for 2FA challenges, and then
| turn it off again. I hate those things.
| superkuh wrote:
| >browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0
|
| For now. It won't be too many years before the mega-corp
| browsers not only drop early HTTP support but they drop
| HTTP/1.1 too. They'll do this in the name of "security".
| And then all that Chrome based browsers will support will
| be their very own invented and open-washed QUIC in the form
| of HTTP/3 and hosting a personal website visitable by a
| random person will not be possible without continued
| permission from an incorporated entity. HTTP/3
| implementations by Google so far have made it so that
| Chrome _CANNOT_ establish a connection without a proper
| certificate authority based TLS certificate. I give this
| change about 3 years.
|
| You can argue that you can always get a CA TLS cert from
| another entity if, say, the incredible centralization of
| all the personal web into LetsEncrypt somehow goes bad.
| True enough, but if the pressure group can pressure LE it
| can probably pressure $otherCA too. And frankly, having to
| get the continued approval of any incorporated entity to
| host a website is just not acceptable. LE is currently a
| benign overlord for good on the web. So was dot Org for
| many years. But if it's made valuable enough the pressure
| and corruption will come.
| Eupraxias wrote:
| Why is this getting downvoted? Can someone who is
| downvoting, or anyone, provide a reason?
|
| Is the comment patently incorrect?
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Is a proof-less conspiracy statement supposed to be
| enjoyed and loved? It's more conspiratorial emotion than
| fact. These "I miss the old internet" posts come up every
| week or so on HN and are largely all the same
| conspiracies with slightly different wording and no more
| proof than before.
| Eupraxias wrote:
| Fair enough - I hadn't considered that the implication
| was it would take a conspiracy to do it.
| randac wrote:
| Welcome to hn in recent years.
|
| The site desperately needs some form of meta moderation..
| I've barely scrolled this thread and seen multiple
| examples already.
| lakomen wrote:
| Did AI write this?
| abeppu wrote:
| > Many people don't care about web culture; they only care
| about consuming.
|
| > Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.
|
| But personal sites don't need to be about web culture per se.
| The best ones were often about some other interest or
| perspective that happened to be combined in a person who was
| also tech-capable enough to share it online. And 15 years ago,
| if you had some passion, whether that was french cooking or
| birding or carpentry or something else, a personal website or
| blog was a pretty good way to share it. But now, you'd get a
| better audience through sharing that same perspective on social
| media.
|
| I think the thing that's hard to get on a personal site is the
| immediate feedback that social media provides. The issue as I
| see it isn't so much that people only want to consume (that was
| always the case) but that people creating content are in a
| numbers-driven competition for eyeballs. Creating and
| publishing stuff online has been mashed together with
| status/follower-seeking behaviors, and your own personal site
| likely doesn't provide the same dopamine hit. Even if you're
| posting about your latest sewing project, putting it on social
| media can get you some likes and comments, but putting it on
| your personal site can feel like talking to an empty room.
|
| And aside from the minor technical challenges of creating your
| own site, I think people rarely talk about the legal or
| administrative burdens of creating your own whitelabel place to
| host your content. Do you want to track how people use your
| site with some analytics tool? What TOS and cookie opt-outs do
| you need to provide in that case? Oh, you'd like to have a
| comments section under your posts? What are the GDPR
| implications of that? You're publishing online so it's not for
| "purely personal or household purposes" after-all. What if
| after your personal project gains an audience, you decide to
| sell some merch -- then because you're 'a business', what has
| to change for you to meet CCPA obligations? Whereas if you have
| just a bunch of social media profiles, you don't control and
| are not responsible for handling that user data.
| btbuildem wrote:
| "People only care about consuming" -- it might seem that way to
| a lazy beholder. The entire digital landscape is engineered for
| consumption -- of ads, and the products they advertise.
|
| Yet individuals continue to CREATE content on which these
| parasites piggy-back. We are creatives by nature. The
| consumption is just one facet; had we built "the internet" out
| of tools and spaces more suitable for creativity, perhaps this
| would be more reflected in the general trends. Even now, you
| can't stem the tide of silly, interesting, creative things
| people post in these narrow, controlled channels.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Interesting that you left off the qualifier "many", changing
| the context of OP's statement.
|
| I'll say, talking about "many" in the pool of all Internet
| users is pretty much meaningless (you can count "many" among
| any sub-population from a starting population so large), but
| OP is clearly implying that _there are a great deal more
| consumers than creators out there_.
|
| Stats support this, like 97% of tweets coming from only 25%
| of tweeters: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/11/15/
| 2-comparing-...
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Exactly this. The sort of person who kept a personal Web
| site in the 90s and 00s is the sort of person who keeps a
| personal journal. Back then it was a fairly significant
| outlay of cash (domain name, hosting, etc.) Right around
| the time these things got significantly cheaper, it also
| ran up against the competition from siloed services
| (Twitter, Facebook).
|
| It takes a certain type of person to keep up a personal
| site that is largely disconnected from a wider audience.
| The people posting memes, quips and barbs on social media
| aren't "creative" per se. They're engaging in the dopamine
| drip machine of social media.
|
| Technical people are more used to this kind of thing, as
| they are almost forced to delegate their cognitive load
| onto some sort of medium that they can access so they don't
| have to remember how to set up load balancing in Docker or
| whatever.
| nirimda wrote:
| > Many people don't care about web culture; they only care
| about consuming.
|
| Strong disagree. People want to participate, they want to be
| part of a conversation. When you "consume" content on Facebook
| or Twitter, you can produce content and reasonably expect to
| get an audience - because you know there's other people there.
|
| If you have your own personal website, you have no natural
| audience. If you're lucky, Google might like it and return it.
| But chances are, it won't thanks to SEO. And even if you do,
| you don't have any replies. A voice shouting into a void,
| signifying nothing. At that point, you need a blogging engine
| that allows for replies, and now you're in the world of off-
| the-shelf solutions. Not so far from Facebook or MySpace, which
| gets you your audience.
| amendegree wrote:
| Back when there was a lot of push back against a certain CEO
| redditors didn't like, that CEO noted that the ratio of
| commenters:viewers was like 1:1000. I personally know many
| people who created reddit accounts only because they were
| forced to by the app, but still have never posted a comment
| or even upvoted something (intentionally).
| dimkorf wrote:
| > People want to participate, they want to be part of a
| conversation.
|
| Are you potentially speaking for a vocal minority here that
| wants to be part of a conversation while ignoring the many
| than simply read (consume)?
| adql wrote:
| Well, there is a reason most sites nowadays have comment
| section. The readers also read comments, even if they might
| only add to them rarely
| mattarm wrote:
| Leaving comments is a different kind of participation
| than curating a personal website. The assertion
| originally under discussion here (a few posts back) is
| that most people don't care to curate their own personal
| website, or, really, any sort of distinguished online
| identity. I think that is true. Most people are on
| Facebook/Instagram/Nextdoor/whatever are doom scrolling
| it, not trying to become an influencer. The assortment of
| people leaving comments on NYT, Amazon reviews, or
| chattering on a forum somewhere, or whatever else, are
| doing just that, but not trying to drive traffic to their
| personal home page.
| sharemywin wrote:
| I don't think people do one thing. sometimes the read
| sometimes they like and sometimes they comment.
| mym1990 wrote:
| People want to mindlessly scroll, a very low energy form of
| participation. At the end of the day, a very very small
| percentage of the users are creating content on a regular
| basis. You can't ignore the things that you give up by opting
| into a mass scale product, privacy, security, etc...
|
| With a personal website, everything does become harder, but
| it ends up being your space and only your space. We've become
| accustomed to going viral and now no one can settle for
| having 50 consistent readers because that just seems so
| insignificant.
| michaelbrave wrote:
| I think it's closer to "people are willing to sacrifice some
| culture for convenience, until it destroys all the culture"
|
| I think we are reaching the point where it's been hollowed
| out enough that there is finally showing some pushback
| against it, many asking if the convenience or access to
| audience is still worth the cultural sacrifices we give for
| it.
|
| That said the demographics of most things are ballpark <10%
| produce content, <20% interact with content or comment and
| the rest >70% just consume content, and this seems to be
| roughly true ranging from websites to video games (change
| interact to multiplayer and produce to things like YouTubers
| or Bloggers about it)
| nightski wrote:
| This isn't true at all imho. People love to create. It's just
| that they are all using Snapchat/Tiktok/Instagram/etc... now
| instead of web sites.
|
| Personally I hate it. But that's where all the creators are.
| Gormo wrote:
| If what were true? I'm not seeing an empirical claim to
| evaluate here.
| indymike wrote:
| > SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now,
| Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like
| MySpace.
|
| What is remarkable is that despite trying to wall the garden,
| the personal website is still a thing.
|
| > Many people don't care about web culture; they only care
| about consuming.
|
| Maybe the era of shifting print, TV and radio to the internet
| is reaching saturation. You can view the internet as a content
| distribution system, but that ignores the key difference
| between internet and broadcast media: it is a two-way
| communication media.
|
| > My take: people created websites back then because there was
| no other choice.
|
| There were plenty of choices. The big innovation was the social
| network that allowed people to connect with friends, family,
| and people with common interests. Now you could write
| something, take a picture, make a video, whatever, and share it
| with people who would start communicating with you and form
| communities around those interests.
|
| > Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.
|
| Most people now communicate via the internet about those non-
| computer-y interests.
| jjav wrote:
| > Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.
|
| Even though I'm in tech in silicon valley, all the personal
| websites I maintain are related to non-tech hobbies.
| [deleted]
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| In my experience techies often maintain websites for their
| non-tech hobbies. But non-techies are much more likely to
| publish about their hobbies via other media like Facebook,
| Reddit etc. Your tech background drives the choice of medium,
| if not the choice of content.
| dzuc wrote:
| The whole beauty of personal websites is their individuality.
| This completely misses the point.
| misingnoglic wrote:
| Wow, thanks for listing me as a personal website that you love!
| It'll give me some motivation to write new blog posts. For anyone
| curious it's the aryaboudaie.com one
| distcs wrote:
| Personal websites still do live. Here on HN too I have seen blog
| posts from independent websites/blogs run by individuals. What
| has changed though is the rapid rise of content platforms like
| Twitter, Medium, Substack and the likes where the sheer number of
| posts overwhelm the number of posts individual website owners can
| produce.
|
| But still the independent websites continue to run and stay
| alive. Some of them have quality content too and appear on HN
| many times.
|
| Is there a community/forum/channel of these independent website
| owners somewhere? Would love to hang out there.
| 5amdotis wrote:
| You should add a working rss feed link here:
|
| `<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS
| feed" href="undefined/writing/rss">`
| bobajeff wrote:
| Could someone tell me what is meant by "just-in-time WebSockets
| loading"? Google has failed me.
| ripsawridge wrote:
| I've had my site (https://www.mountainwerks.org) going since
| 1998, and for sure, I am myself the primary user. But over time,
| my gosh, there is a lot of content. It started as a log of trips
| to the mountains. I found religion through trying to pay homage
| to nature by remembering each "piece" of it. Because an attitude
| of thankfulness gradually became nature (thanks to going out so
| danged much).
|
| I wouldn't know any other way to live. Old ideas are often gold.
| lkrubner wrote:
| The law matters. Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act
| matters. And in the old days, for several centuries, the laws
| regarding libel and slander mattered, but of course at the moment
| they are not being aggressively pursued. Nowadays you can go on
| Twitter and say that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring out of
| a pizza restaurant in Washington DC, and Clinton is not allowed
| to bring a libel suit against Twitter because of Section 230, nor
| would it be fruitful for her to file thousands (or even millions)
| of suits against the anonymous people who post that particular
| rumor. And so, for all practical purposes, the normal laws
| regarding libel have been suspended. And yet people still need
| some way to defend their reputations against lies.
|
| Do you want people to set up personal websites?
|
| The answer is obvious: repeal Section 230.
|
| Once Section 230 is gone, sites such as Twitter and Facebook will
| simply cease to exist. They will either shut down on their own,
| or they will be sued into oblivion.
|
| Everyone would be forced to set up their own website, and then
| take full legal responsibility for what is posted to that
| website.
|
| Once Section 230 is gone, then the normal rules of libel come
| back into force, as they existed for several centuries. Some
| extremists might regard this as censorship, but for several
| centuries the normal laws of libel were not regarded as
| censorship.
|
| A civil society can only prevail where people are required to
| take full legal responsibility for the things they say in public
| spaces.
|
| At the current moment, our laws regarding libel are made almost
| useless because the publisher of the lies are protected by
| Section 230, and going after each anonymous individual, when
| thousands or even millions of people are repeating the lie, is
| too burdensome for even wealthy individuals to pursue the cases.
| When wealthy people ask their lawyers "Can I sue?" the lawyers
| remind them of the Streisand effect:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
|
| I do not know what will happen in the future, but I am certain
| the current set of arrangements cannot survive. People must have
| some way of defending their reputations, and the traditional way
| of doing so has been through our laws regarding libel and
| slander.
|
| To my mind, the most obvious way forward is to repeal Section
| 230. Large sites such as Twitter and Facebook would likely
| vanish, and people would then be forced to set up personal
| websites, and they would be responsible for everything said on
| those websites. Like newspaper publishers, they could publish
| many writers, if they wanted to, but they would face the normal
| legal burdens of libel law, just like every newspaper.
| [deleted]
| bccdee wrote:
| This would create a web enormously hostile to social
| interaction. No website would be able to host user-generated
| content. The only ways to communicate would be to read
| someone's website or send them an email. It's such a
| destructive proposal that I'm honestly kind of amazed by it.
| bovermyer wrote:
| You can encourage personal websites without discouraging
| communal platforms, though.
| lkrubner wrote:
| The historical evidence suggests otherwise.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| Anyone know how a way to run a personal site for around $50 USD
| or under a year that can be pointed to a custom domain? My wife
| does some rug making and wants a portfolio available to show off
| her art, but we would prefer not to pay $10-20/month for such a
| site.
| mateomorris wrote:
| primo.so (FOSS)
| preommr wrote:
| $50 ???
|
| If you're slightly technical that should be $1/year for hosting
| + $10 for domain name registration.
|
| I don't know what the best way is now, but a few years ago I
| set up an s3 bucket that where I basically got charged nothing
| because the site was < 10mb, and I had that behind cloudflare's
| cdn which doesn't charge for bandwith. S3 lets you serve static
| files if the bucket name is the same as the domain name - so no
| webserver or anything needed.
|
| I am pretty sure for a very small static site there's probably
| a handful of options that are basically free. One of gitpages,
| cloudflare pages, I think have free bandwith, not sure about
| vercel, or netlify.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| The $50 is because I dont want to have to get a cheap vps and
| maintain everything. I want to be able to load up a custom
| theme in some CMS and give her the login credentials.
| treesknees wrote:
| I've had excellent results with pointing people to Google
| Sites. The editor and available features work really well for
| just a static site for someone non-technical. You can set it up
| on a free Google account and point a custom domain name to it
| [1] very easily.
|
| [1] https://support.google.com/sites/answer/9068867?hl=en
| nickthegreek wrote:
| > https://support.google.com/sites/answer/9068867?hl=en
|
| I maintain several google sites for my job, dont know why I
| didn't think of this route!
| mxuribe wrote:
| Review hosting providers on the folloiwing site:
| https://www.lowcostwebhostings.com/
|
| I use digital ocean, but their cost actualy rose a tad bit over
| the last year, and i have heard that hetzner has better
| pricing, though i have not yet used them. Again, just take a
| look at the above site, and can search for a low cost hosting
| provider. Others leverage github pages, etc...for free, but
| that seems antithetical to this greater topic of self-host your
| own. Good luck!
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I hate how so many of these are 1 year at this pricing, and
| then balloon to $9+/mo.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| Over here in the UK companies like mythic-beasts would provide
| what you are asking about.
|
| https://www.mythic-beasts.com/hosting
|
| You would add your CMS of choice (Wordpress running on the
| shared server or rsync up a local set of static files)
|
| I'm _assuming_ companies like this must be ten a penny in USA.
| walterbell wrote:
| Neocities ($5/mo), https://neocities.org/supporter
| a9h74j wrote:
| Check out fastmail.com ... Given an email account, hosting a
| new website is nearly as easy as uploading an entire directory
| (to file storage) in one operation, then assigning a url to it
| (under one of the 20-30 fastmail domains). I have not linked a
| custom domain to one of these, but they do IIRC support it.
|
| Estimate $3/month w/o the custom domain.
| inasmuch wrote:
| I run my mom's portfolio site through porkbun.com. $10/yr
| domain + $3/mo hosting = $46.
|
| I used to use nearlyfreespeech.net for my own site and it was
| even cheaper, but a little more complicated to get up and
| running.
| sodimel wrote:
| Buying an old refubished computer and running whatever web
| server on a small & efficient linux distro is not really cheap
| in the beginning (since you've got to spend a few $ to buy the
| computer that will be a small home server), but in the long
| term it's really cheap (I spent 50EUR in 2017 for an old dell
| optiplex fx160 on ebay, and it's still running my websites
| today).
| jwilk wrote:
| How much do you pay for electricity?
| 5amdotis wrote:
| A static website could easily be hosted on GitHub, Cloudflare,
| or Netlify for free. Only cost is the domain name and maybe an
| email provider.
| terminal_d wrote:
| If all you need is a static website, you can do it for under
| $10/year if you use AWS S3. Alternatively, Cloudflare pages is
| free.
| croisillon wrote:
| All your comments seem to be flagged by default, please reach
| an admin to clear that up
| julianlam wrote:
| The HN zeitgeist (at least as of 2021) was to use a static site
| generator like Hugo or Jekyll. Why would we want to use Nym --
| speaking as someone who doesn't use either, that is.
|
| When the itch to "small b blog" (love the term, by the way) came
| around, I built my own blogging frontend utilising GitHub Gists
| as the data store[1]. It's been working great so far, and uses
| basically no resources.
|
| [1] https://devnull.land/github-gist-blog
| zote wrote:
| Wouldn't adding Frontmatter to your markdown be a possible
| alternative to multiple files per gist to store metadata
| julianlam wrote:
| Hey, thanks for reading! That is possibly a solution I could
| take. At the time I was focused mainly on getting something
| shipped asap.
|
| It's been working well so far, although I did run into that
| issue of having more than 30 posts, so the oldest ones have
| already fallen off. Oops!
| jayfae wrote:
| Replied to the wrong message - but I did something similar
| here at https://www.jaynicolsmith.com/ (its still messy) -
| followed a tutorial somewhere and it processes my obsidian.md
| vault, make a note - push to git - tada - you can steal
| anything i have used for this from here
| https://github.com/Jayziv/summer-project
| devonallie wrote:
| I write all my posts in Obsidian and export them to Hugo and
| it's fantastic!
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Honestly given HackerNews I was wondering if that was the
| actual rock at first.
| Eupraxias wrote:
| Honest question: does anyone else open notepad and start typing
| when they want to make a new webpage?
|
| I have been making website and pages since 1998, and have never
| done it another way.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| Yes. Well, I use vim, but the principle is the same.
| asdff wrote:
| Likewise but with nano for html syntax highlighting. Workflow
| is write file then reload my browser window. I'm working on a
| personal website with my resume and projects listed and such
| in plain html without any css and I'm struggling to imagine
| why I would want anything more complicated, short of sexier
| window dressing perhaps or as a proof of work itself that I
| know how to fiddle with the latest webdev libraries. With
| plain jane html I can embed images and hyperlinks and format
| text into nice little bullet points or however. The entire
| site is about 600kb so far, images included. What more could
| I possibly want that isn't just cruft?
| beseku wrote:
| Is this something to do with Brian Lovin? I see the design of his
| personal site is a heavy influence, but didn't know it was open
| sourced?
|
| https://brianlovin.com/writing
| wongmjane wrote:
| The source code is _really_ similar
|
| Not seeing Brian Lovin's name in the LICENSE file in Nym
| either...
| trampish wrote:
| Good to see this fixed quickly: https://github.com/Nym-
| HQ/nym/commit/a3530463ee323b8ba492960...
| wongmjane wrote:
| After being caught, they called erasing Brian Lovin's
| credit from the LICENSE file as "A huge oversight on our
| part"
|
| https://twitter.com/nym_hq/status/1592176933445701633
| NickBusey wrote:
| Had this happen to one of my projects. Someone decided to
| remove my name from the LICENSE file on their fork. I
| called them out on it, and they put it back, saying it
| was a "mistake".
|
| The only thing in the original commit was removing my
| name. Hard to believe that could occur accidentally.
| lyptt wrote:
| Looks like they've claimed Brian Lovin's work as their own,
| judging by this commit:
|
| https://github.com/Nym-
| HQ/nym/commit/3dda085064e745bd43f8b05...
| [deleted]
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| Yup. 10 commits, first commit was just 4 days ago. Same
| with their public website & docs. On Github, it's all
| barely 4 days old.
|
| Brian Lovin has released his work under the MIT license.
| AFAIK I believe this leaves it open to others to take the
| code and just run with it.
|
| Even so, looking at their value proposition, it's just a
| landing page that leads to https://nymhq.com/join where you
| can subscribe to a "waiting list" to join a server. They
| claim "Nym is currently in private beta with limited
| servers, but is accepting waitlist requests now."
|
| The "showcase" on the front page are just content fodder
| (AI? Web 2/3/5?) with quick, unstyled instances of their
| blogging software. The rest of that landing page seems to
| contain a lot of fluff as well.
|
| Frankly, I'm extremely apprehensive about supporting this.
| [deleted]
| thisisnotanexit wrote:
| It is open sourced here: https://github.com/brianlovin/briOS
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| As MIT, not as "tell people it's yours":
| https://github.com/Nym-
| HQ/nym/commit/3dda085064e745bd43f8b05...
| rzzzt wrote:
| And the condition under which one is allowed to do the
| things the MIT license allows one to do:
| The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall
| be included in all copies or substantial portions of the
| Software.
|
| No more steps!
| falcolas wrote:
| Dear Nym, check your layout on narrow screens. It's about 50%
| whitespace, thanks to the two un-dismissable blank columns on the
| left.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/0ilhUAw
| davesque wrote:
| I always love having an excuse to repost this:
| https://www.cameronsworld.net/
|
| This is my idea of the personal web.
| lazyfanatic wrote:
| Anyone remember webrings?
|
| Technology is so circular, old becomes new, over and over again.
|
| "Join our network!" at the end reminded me of them.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Aside: it would be nice to have geographically local "web-
| rings". There was a sewing consortium place nearby that I
| randomly drove by, and also a local quilting specialty shop
| that I saw, why aren't they all connected to each other in a
| "makerspace" webring, or "craft" or "art" ring with like
| waypost signs: "next cool art store 3.5mi thattaway =>"
|
| Same with craft brewing, or scratch bakeries, etc.
|
| Technically it might be "advertising your competition", but in
| a different light, it's trying to expand the amount of time and
| $$$ that the target customer group is spending in _any_ of the
| specialty / niche areas.
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