[HN Gopher] A simple web we own
___________________________________________________________________
A simple web we own
Author : speckx
Score : 158 points
Date : 2026-02-23 16:01 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rsdoiel.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (rsdoiel.github.io)
| thefounder wrote:
| I think the main issue with federated apps is the identity and
| moderation. Without identity verification is hard to moderate so
| you end up with closed systems where some big CO does the
| moderation at an acceptable level
| sowbug wrote:
| This is only half a thought.
|
| The current wave of AI agents is diminishing the value of
| identity as a DDOS or content-moderation signal. The formula
| until now included bot = bad, but unless your service wants to
| exclude everyone using OpenClaw and friends, that's no longer a
| valid heuristic.
|
| If identity is no longer a strong signal, then the internet
| must move away from CAPTCHAs and logins and reputation, and
| focus more on the proposed content or action instead. Which
| might not be so bad. After all, if I read a thought-provoking,
| original, enriching comment on HN, do I really care if it was
| actually written by a dog?
|
| We might finally be getting close to https://xkcd.com/810/.
|
| One more half thought: what if the solution to the Sybil
| problem is deciding that it's not a problem? Go ahead and spin
| up your bot network, join the party. If we can design systems
| that assign zero value to uniqueness and require originality or
| creativity for a contribution to matter, then successful Sybil
| "attacks" are no longer attacks, but free work donated by the
| attacker.
| caconym_ wrote:
| > if I read a thought-provoking, original, enriching comment
| on HN, do I really care if it was actually written by a dog?
|
| I would rather just read the thought as it was originally
| expressed by a human somewhere in the AI's training data,
| rather than a version of it that's been laundered through AI
| and deployed according to the separate, hidden intent of the
| AI's operator.
| ted537 wrote:
| Unfortunately the transparency of the IP stack means that unless
| u want whole world to know where u live via one DNS query, you'd
| need to use a service to proxy back to urself. And if ur paying
| for remote compute anyways, you could probably just host ur stuff
| there. Any machine that can proxy traffic back to you is just as
| capable of hosting ur static stuff there.
| nickorlow wrote:
| It only gives a pretty rough estimation, not a street address.
| I don't think many self-hosters have run into issue w/ this.
| hellcow wrote:
| > I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public
| Internet access
|
| A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things
| online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing
| online...
| graypegg wrote:
| I think the point the author is trying to make is more so about
| these mini networks on their own LAN, which their family uses.
| (And maybe dreaming of a neighbourhood utility LAN as a middle
| ground between LAN in your house and WAN as just a trunk to a
| big ISP node) The full quote is - A Raspberry
| Pi 3B+ with a 3 gigabyte hard drive setup as a "server" (makes
| this site available on my home network[9]) - I publish
| this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access
| (I have the least expensive subscription for this) ...
| [9] I can view my personal web on my home network from my
| phone, tablet and computers. So can the rest of my family.
| nicbou wrote:
| Yes, but that person owns their website, its content, and the
| address it lives at. They can publish anything they want, in
| any format they want.
|
| Hosting on GitHub is merely a convenience; they can up and
| leave anytime.
| varun_ch wrote:
| in this case, they're on a github.io subdomain, which they
| don't own.
| tetris11 wrote:
| There's a whole meme subgenre dedicated to this type of
| argument. Search for "Yet you participate in society, curious!"
| driverdan wrote:
| Except there are a ton of alternatives to hosting on Github
| that are not owned by one of the large companies he's railing
| against.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| For reals. I love the general premise behind the article, but
| to me how you publish it, and how others access it, is the
| sauce. Creating static sites is hardly the problem.
| born-jre wrote:
| I kind of resonate with a lot of things in the article. My own
| personal view is that we should make hosting stuff vastly
| simpler; that's one of the goals of my project, at least my
| attempt (self promo)
|
| https://github.com/blue-monads/potatoverse
| nine_k wrote:
| Potatoverse is a great name :)) BTW do you remember
| Sandstorm.io?
| born-jre wrote:
| Thanks cap'n-py. Yeah, I love Sandstorm. My goal is to be
| more portable, lighter, and a 'download binary and run' kind
| of tool. There are also other attempts around what I call the
| 'packaging with Docker' approach (Coolify, etc.), which are
| more attempts at packaging existing apps. But my approach--
| the platform--gives a bunch of stuff you can use to make apps
| faster, but you have to bend to its idiosyncrasies. In turn,
| you do not need a beefy home lab to run it (not everyone is a
| tinkerer). It's more focused, so it will be easier for the
| end user running it than for the developer.
| podgorniy wrote:
| Co-ownership of the hardware is a social not technical problem.
| Think of questions of trust, responsibility, who has power, who
| and how contributes, how decisions are made, etc, etc
| selridge wrote:
| Who is this we, kemosabe?
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > Simple to use software that empowers us to both read and write
| hypertext4 and syndicated content
|
| Simple to use software... this would be grand!
|
| > Raspberry Pi OS (a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU
| Linux)
|
| Is this simple? I would contend that it is not. Why do I tell
| people "buy apple products" as a matter of course? Because they
| have decent security, great ease of use, and support is an Apple
| Store away.
|
| They still manage to screw things up.
|
| Look at the emergence of docker as an install method for software
| on linux. We sing the praises of this as means of software
| distribution and installation... and yet it's functionally un-
| usable by normal (read: non technical) people.
|
| Usability needs to make a comeback.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > great ease of use
|
| Apple stuff is a nightmare of dark patterns and user-hostile
| idiocy.
|
| Maybe it's easy if you have Stockholm syndrome and have
| internalized all the arcane gestures, icons and bug avoidance
| patterns.
|
| The average normie has no clue, though. (This is borne from
| experience, I have like 8 iPhones in the immediate family among
| children and seniors.)
| canadiantim wrote:
| I personally think the trend we witnessed with clawdbot where
| people ran to buy mac minis or other ways of self hosting ai
| agents is going to be a huge wind in the sails for generally
| hosting things at home.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| This guy has been around long enough to know about NNTP, which is
| the original distributed people-focused web, but talks about how
| HTML is some kind of barrier to entry.
|
| HTTP requires always-on + always-discoverable infrastructure
|
| It's all over the place.
| disease wrote:
| As the author of a content management system I made with the idea
| to democratize internet content creation, I've had a lot of the
| same thoughts that the author brings up here. I've always thought
| that even learning Markdown was a bridge to far when it comes to
| empowering non-technical users however. In my experience it's
| best just to supply tooling similar to Word where you have
| buttons for things like lists and bolding. Using Markdown as the
| format itself is something I will agree with though.
|
| Another thought I had is that local AI could most definitely play
| a part in helping non-technical users create the kind of content
| they want. If your CMS gives you a GPT-like chat window that
| allows a non-technical user to restyle the page as they like, or
| do things like make mass edits - then I think that is something
| that could help some of the issues mentioned here.
| tvink wrote:
| It's definitely an approach. I do think in true democratization
| of the internet, teaching people some tech is inevitable. We
| just can't have equal access if we retain the classes of user
| and maker as completely distinct.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > supply tooling similar to Word
|
| just fyi, Word still has Save As -> Web Page (.htm). For a blog
| post or newsletter type thing i bet it works just fine.
| graypegg wrote:
| I wonder if some part of the FrontPage [0] codebase lives on
| in there...
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage
| jodrellblank wrote:
| https://openlivewriter.com/ lives on
| sagaro wrote:
| I agree with the point that big companies have persuaded people
| that only they can offer ease of publishing content. most of my
| friends publish on Facebook, X, Instagram etc.
|
| I have tried to get them to publish markdown sites using GitHub
| pages, but the pain of having to git commit and do it via desktop
| was the blocker.
|
| So I recently made them a mobile app called JekyllPress [0] with
| which they can publish their posts similar to WordPress mobile
| app. And now a bunch of them regularly publish on GitHub pages. I
| think with more tools to simplify the publishing process, more
| people will start using GitHub pages (my app still requires some
| painful onboarding like creating a repo, enabling GitHub pages
| and getting PAT, no oAuth as I don't have any server).
|
| [0] https://www.gapp.in/projects/jekyllpress/
| righthand wrote:
| Isn't publishing on Github Pages still posting to a corporate
| centrally owned entity and not a solution to the problem
| described?
| sagaro wrote:
| But it is portable. It is essentially markdown files. You can
| download your repo, compile the Jekyll to static pages and
| publish them anywhere.
|
| When you publish to Facebook, WordPress etc you can't easily
| get your stuff out. You will have to process them even if
| they allow you to download your content as a zip folder. The
| images will be broken. Links between pages won't work etc.
| righthand wrote:
| Facebook provides a data export service which gives you a
| zip file with a web version of all your content. I'm not
| sure what the difference is then between that and a Github
| hosted repository of all your content as a webpage.
| sagaro wrote:
| The main difference is the data structure and the intent
| of the export. Facebook's tool is built for data
| compliance and local offline viewing, not web
| portability. If you open that Facebook zip file, the HTML
| version is just a massive dump of proprietary markup. To
| actually migrate those posts to a new blog, you'd have to
| write a custom scraper just to extract your own text from
| their messy div tags. If you use their JSON export, you
| still have to write a custom script to parse their
| specific schema and remap all the hardcoded local image
| paths so they work on a live server. With a Github Pages
| repo, your content is already sitting there as raw,
| standardized Markdown. You can just take that folder of
| .md files, drop it into Hugo, 11ty, or any other static
| site generator, and it just works. No scraping or data-
| wrangling required.
| IFC_LLC wrote:
| I mean, you do have a point, and I'll quite agree with it. The
| only way of monetizing your writing is to use Substack or Medium,
| or whatever.
|
| Yet your approach is appallingly low on the other side of the
| spectrum. I've been in IT for the past 25 years. I have yet to
| see a non-IT person who knows what dedicated IP is. If you are
| not publishing it on the internet, then what's the point?
|
| I've seen plenty of companies where the owner just had a read-
| only shared drive, where people can rummage thru a pack of PDFs.
| This' was all fine with that.
|
| You have to understand, manage and work with the complexities of
| the tools, and offer tools quite enough for the task. It's
| alright to offer what you do to an engineer who has a spare Pi
| and a couple of days to kill. But it's quite useless for anyone
| else to adopt.
| RajT88 wrote:
| The only way we own a web of our own is to develop much more of a
| culture of leaving smallish machines online all the time. Imagine
| something like Tor or BitTorrent, but everyone has a very simple
| way of running their own node for content hosting.
|
| That always-on device? To get critical mass, instead of just the
| nerds, you'd need it to ship with devices which are always-on,
| like routers/gateways, smart TV's. Then you're back to being at
| the mercy of centralized companies who also don't love patching
| their security vulnerabilities.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| if only we all had a little device that was always on and and
| connected....
| amarant wrote:
| If I'm reading the implication right, you're having a pretty
| terrible idea. Glossing over what running a server would do
| to your battery, it would never work because of the routing
| issues you'll run into.
|
| With IPv6 it would theoretically be possible, but currently
| with ipv4 and NATs everywhere, your website would almost
| never be reachable, even with fancy workarounds like dynDNS
| nine_k wrote:
| This is very right. There are two obstacles.
|
| (1) Security. An always-on, externally accessible device will
| always be a target for breaking in. You want the device to be
| bulletproof, and to have defense in depth, so that breaking
| into one service does not affect anything else. Something like
| Proxmox that works on low-end hardware and is as easy to
| administer as a mobile phone would do. We are somehow far from
| this yet. A very limited thing like a static site may be made
| both easy and bulletproof though.
|
| (2) Connectivity providers should allow that. Most home routers
| don't get a static IP, or even a globally routable IPv4 at all.
| Or even a stable IPv6. This complicates the DNS setup, and
| without DNS such resources are basically invisible.
|
| From the pure resilience POV, it seems more important to keep
| control of your domain, and have an automated way to deploy
| your site / app on whatever new host, which is regularly
| tested. Then use free or cheap DNS and VM hosting of
| convenience. It takes some technical chops, but can likely be
| simplified and made relatively error-proof with a concerted
| effort.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Both or those are solved by having a tunnel and a cache that
| is hosted in the cloud. Something like tailscale or
| cloudflare provides this pretty much out of the box, but
| wireguard + nginx on a cheap VPS would accomplish much the
| same if you are serious about avoiding the big guys.
| nine_k wrote:
| If you already pay for a cheap VPS, why not host the whole
| thing there? It's the simple Web. (As has been noted in
| comments elsewhere.)
| cousin_it wrote:
| It's not about ease of publishing. The issue is what people get
| in return for publishing. Until you can design a platform that
| gives top creators as much money+attention as commercial
| platforms, you'll see a drain of top creators and their viewers
| to commercial platforms.
| munificent wrote:
| 100%. You don't even need to give people money. It's about
| attention and feedback.
|
| People post photos on Instagram and status updates on Facebook
| _because their friends will see it there and give it a thumbs
| up_.
|
| A couple of decades ago, I spent a lot of time laboriously
| building a website for scratch for my photography. It was
| objectively a really nice site. I had my own domain, hosted it
| on a VPS, and put a ton of work into the layout and design.
|
| But none of my friends ever thought to go there. I could see by
| my web stats that every now and then a random stranger would
| find the site... but they had no easy way of connecting with me
| and acknowledging that they saw it. If they put a lot of effort
| in, they could find my email address and email, but that's a
| hell of a lot harder than just clicking a little thumbs up
| button next to a Facebook post or filling a comment in the
| comment box.
|
| Uploading photos to my site was about as rewarding as printing
| them out and throwing them in the trash. I thought about adding
| support for that to my site, but then it opens the whole can of
| worms around user-generated content, abuse, moderation, etc.
|
| Eventually, I moved to Flickr, which at the time was an actual
| community that gave me that connection. Then Flickr fizzled
| out. Now, on the rare times I bother to process a photo... I
| just upload it to Facebook because that's where (a dwindling
| subset of) my friends are.
|
| It's not about the content. It's about the human connection. A
| CMS won't fix that.
| tclancy wrote:
| >It's about attention and feedback.
|
| Feedback maybe, but blogging didn't start for attention.
| That's something that got bolted on by a nasty virus we as
| humans tend to be carriers of. I don't think feedback was
| even an inspiration for the initial bloggers.
| munificent wrote:
| No, I don't think that's true. I was active in the early
| blogging days and writing blogs as a response to other
| blogs was a really common pattern and part of the way the
| community functioned. It was sort of one big distributed
| conversation.
|
| Certainly, it's fundamental to human nature that if we work
| hard to create something, we want _some_ way to tell that
| another human was moved by it.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| I think this mostly misses the biggest reason why writers would
| choose big tech platforms or other big platforms: discovery and
| aggregation. If you want to speak to be heard and not just for
| its own sake, then you want to go where the people are hanging
| out and where they could actually find your content.
|
| This is like talking about how book authors don't need Amazon
| when you have a printer and glue at home.
| istillwritecode wrote:
| I like how it's not mobile friendly.
| moffers wrote:
| It's not really covered, but p2p technology combined with every
| phone in the world (and a little wishful thinking) could make for
| some neat applications.
| Jaauthor wrote:
| I don't wanna brag but this is pretty much the premise behind my
| soon-to-be-published scifi novel:
|
| https://inkican.com/mesh-middle-grade-scifi-thriller/
| octoclaw wrote:
| The real barrier was never technical. It was convenience and
| discovery. Running a Pi at home is trivial for anyone on HN, but
| the moment you want people to actually find your stuff, you need
| DNS, a stable IP, and some way to not get buried under the noise.
|
| Tailscale and similar overlay networks have made the "accessible
| from anywhere" part way easier than it used to be. The missing
| piece is still discovery. RSS was the closest we got to
| decentralized discovery, and we collectively let it rot. Maybe
| it's time to bring it back properly.
| jeromechoo wrote:
| What does "bringing (RSS) back properly" entail in your eyes?
|
| It's still alive. Many sites still use it. Many people still
| subscribe to those sites. RSS reader apps are still being
| created to this day.
| naasking wrote:
| RSS directories perhaps, instead of relying on search
| engines.
| tsumnia wrote:
| > The missing piece is still discovery.
|
| I think the key issue here is that Attention is a temporal
| construct, meaning discovery is often tied to "being the first
| thing that comes to people's minds" which means SEO, reverse
| engineering the ranking algorithms, and constantly having to
| manage an "online persona". Note none of those things
| contribute to the actual work you're doing, just your
| "marketing department" (and whatever time/financial "budget"
| you intend to give it).
|
| MrBeast figured out the YouTube algorithm - post early and
| often. Is that how we exist on modern Internet when every
| website/thumbnail is engineered by a team to maximize
| clickthrough rates? I agree RSS is useful, but it faces the
| same scalability issues if everyone starts filling up your RSS
| feeds. Given the limited amount of time you can devote to a
| particular task, we'll return to the era of A/B testing
| Headlines.
| axus wrote:
| I agree with owning the network devices, and lack of control here
| is a problem that still has solutions.
|
| And self-hosting personal services makes sense and we're able to
| do that.
|
| BUT, we don't own the connections. There's always going to be
| shared infrastructure for connecting these devices worldwide, and
| without an ideal state of Communism or utopian capitalism we're
| not going to own them or want to be responsible for them. Any
| kind of service that depends on a central database is not going
| to be communally owned.
|
| Ownership is an economic problem, the technical aspect is merely
| interesting. Bitcoin might be a great example of this.
| asim wrote:
| We got here iteratively..not all at once. So the path back...it's
| iterative. I shouldn't even say back. We're not going back. We
| have to go in a new direction. And again it's evolutionary. So
| ultimately a lot of these big systems and big tech companies
| aren't going anywhere and they will be integral to all
| infrastructure for the foreseeable future whether that be
| technical, financial or related to public services. But as
| individuals we can slowly shift some of our efforts elsewhere in
| ways that it might matter.
|
| Here's my small contribution to that. https://github.com/micro/mu
| - an app platform without ads, algorithms or tracking.
| malomalsky wrote:
| Bro just found fediverse
| swiftcoder wrote:
| The irony of this being fully hosted on GitHub should not be
| lost. A toaster is sufficient to host a mostly static site, a VPS
| would be far more than sufficient.
| post-it wrote:
| GitHub is free, a VPS isn't.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| You know what they say about the kind of services FAANG gives
| away for free...
|
| And yes, I get the practicality of it. However, when people
| are actually doing shit like this[1] in the real world,
| writers of manifestos might consider practicing what they
| preach a tad more.
|
| [1]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com
| ux266478 wrote:
| Owning things isn't free (and a VPS isn't owning things,
| either)
|
| I absolutely agree with the concept, but people have to be
| ready to do their own work rather than delegating it to other
| parties. Consolidation has happened because these massive
| conglomerates absorb operational complexity on the cheap, and
| that's attractive. Moving away from them means we take on the
| responsibility of doing it ourselves.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| You think you "own" a VPS?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Well, you pay for it at least, and hence enter into a
| contract with the service provider. A free GitHub account is
| a come-on by Microsoft to enmesh you further in the world of
| hosted services - the precise thing this manifesto is
| complaining about
| Findecanor wrote:
| I remember a web when practically every ISP allowed you to have a
| "home page" hosted with them. Your home page was situated in the
| "public_html" directory of your _home_ directory on their server
| -- hence the name.
|
| Then the URL was http://www.<hostname.domain>/~<username>
|
| I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time.
|
| Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file
| sharing?
| graypegg wrote:
| I've seen a few around on HN actually! Though they tend to be
| university systems, or pages hosted on https://tilde.club/
| rokkamokka wrote:
| Likely demand dropped and when the infra hosting it was needing
| replacement it just never got replaced
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Think it had more to do with the consolidation of the ISP
| space.
|
| I used to have my choice of dozens of ISP's. Now if I am lucky
| I might have 2 or 3 from very large companies that did the math
| on keeping that going. It mostly happened when ADSL and cable
| took over. In most areas that meant only 2 or 3 companies could
| actually provide anything at speeds their customers wanted.
| Think at the time they always said it was cost cutting.
| titzer wrote:
| Universities still have this--well, ok, at least for Faculty :)
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~btitzer/riff.html
|
| I actually haven't had a homepage for a long time because of
| the lack of the easy "put my home directory on the web", but
| I'd like to go back now to doing that.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i think Apache sets this up by default or use to. Every user on
| Linux would get a www, or maybe it was htdocs, folder in their
| home directory when they were added to the system. Any file you
| put there is served by Apache at resource /~<username> which
| was reading from /home/<username>/www on the file system.
|
| There use to be lots and lots of ISPs and so they were small
| enough to have a single webserver with all their customers
| setup as users and Apache serving content. They'd also setup
| FTP on the same server so you could get your html files into
| your www folder. Software like Dreamweaver had a ftp client
| built in, so you'd click like a "publish" button and it wold
| login to FTP and transfer your files.
|
| i would imagine this went away because it got expensive as the
| customer base grew and ISPs consolidated and it made no money.
| Other options with php, mysql, and other services cropped up
| and could offer more and charge for it so I think ISPs just
| preferred to concentrate on network access and not hosting
| websites.
| pvtmert wrote:
| Apache doesn't have it on by default but easy to turn it on.
| It's called usermod or mod_user. By default it's the ~/www
| directory. So, anyone with /home/<name>/www ends up being
| site.url/~<name>/
|
| It is also possible to add .htaccess and other things there,
| like username/password challenge (WWW-Authenticate) into that
| on per-user basis.
|
| Mostly universities had hosting setup the same way. ISPs
| would also offer a similar thing with an additional fee to
| your internet-subscription. They mostly provided FTP to
| upload files. Nowadays if anyone tries to, it will be a SFTP
| rather than FTP.
| evanevan wrote:
| I really like this model for individual services.
|
| The challenge I've always felt, is shared services -- if I'm
| running infra myself, I can depend upon it, but if someone else
| is running it, I'm never really sure if I can, which makes
| external services really hard to rely on and invest into.
|
| Maybe you can get further than expected with individual services?
| But shared services at some point seem really useful.
|
| I think web2 solved that in an unfortunate way, where you know
| the corporations operating the services / networks are aligned in
| some ways but not in others.
|
| But would be great to have shared services that do have better
| guarantees. Disclaimer, we're working on something in that
| direction, but really curious what others have seen or thinking
| in this area.
| mold_aid wrote:
| Very much enjoyed this. Always am shocked that my colleagues on
| the humanistic/writing studies side don't have a larger
| contingent actively contributing to web and publication
| technologies/specs, ceding so much of that space to folks with
| design backgrounds; they still don't really invest enough time
| into understanding networked writing
| Tepix wrote:
| > Tiny computers are like tiny homes
|
| They totally suck like tiny homes? No, actually they are better
| than tiny homes. Browser are the #1 reason why you want a
| computer that's better than a Pi 500. Wanting to play modern
| games is #2.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| I really do agree with the sentiment of this guy. I am this guy
| mentally but what he is saying is so painfully out of touch and
| completely ignores how people actually use the web today. My bro
| the web isnt controlled by corps because its to hard to host a
| web page. Corps have created these extremely far reaching and
| complex applications and people prefer to use those than browser
| through statically generated pages. Average man doesnt want to
| come home and update his page he just wants to open the app on
| his phone, scroll for a bit and close it.
|
| The problem is in the environment but also the user behavior.
| Unless you can provide a convincing argument to change both by
| presenting an actual improvement then its farting in the wind
| jmadeano wrote:
| I enjoyed the article, but I'm skeptical of the "democratize via
| hardware + networking" path. Most people won't run a Pi, manage
| updates/backups, or debug home networking, and that's fine (as
| you note).
|
| But I do think we're reaching a turning point on the software
| side. The barrier to building custom, personalized apps is
| trending toward 0. I'm not naive enough to think every grandma
| will suddenly start asking ChatGPT to "build me an app to do
| XYZ," but with the right UX it can be implicit. Imagine you tell
| an assistant: "My doctor says my blood sugar is high. Research
| tips to reduce it." -> it not only replies with tips, it also
| proactively builds a custom app (that you own and control) for
| tracking your blood sugar (measurements, meals, reminders,
| charts, etc.). You can edit it by describing changes ("add a
| weekly trend graph," "don't nag me after 8pm," etc.).
|
| This doesn't fully solve your Big Co control issue (they own the
| flagship models today), but open-weight + local options keep
| improving. I'm hopeful we have a chance to tip the scales back
| toward co-owner and participant.
| cess11 wrote:
| "it also proactively builds a custom app"
|
| Does it deploy it as well?
| deepdarkforest wrote:
| > You can edit it by describing changes
|
| Even this is hard. Most people don't know what they want,
| and/or they don't know how to describe it/imagine it. They
| don't even know what a trend graph is.
|
| They just want someone else to do the mental effort of creating
| a nice product. Hence iOS > android for most people. They don't
| want to customise basically anything other than colours.
|
| That's why i predict Lovable/replit etc will not go mainstream.
| And why chatgpt will just offer you their UIs mainly. Artifacts
| weren't a big hit
| RajT88 wrote:
| If you've never worked in a call center, or in a technical
| support role, it can be hard to understand just how
| inarticulate people are on average. Even programmers.
|
| ...And how much brainpower goes into understanding what
| people like this are getting at when they speak about things.
| There's a lot of context and human element to this; I'm
| skeptical AI will be any good at it in the near future.
| tekne wrote:
| I mean -- my (completely non-technical) mother, after a few
| hours of my guidance, has started vibe-coding apps and websites
| for her local community organizations. And, like -- it _works_.
| shuntress wrote:
| Truly democratizing the web requires that "Compute Server"
| becomes a typical home appliance that is no more difficult to
| use than an oven or a furnace including the widespread access
| to vocational technicians who come to your house and fix it for
| you.
| kseudo wrote:
| This post resonated with me. I have tried self hosting multiple
| times over the years and always gave up cause it is so hard to
| manage and there was always an online service that was good
| enough.
|
| This weekend I vibe coded (dont shoot me) a homelab platform
| that hosts a bunch of useful services on a MacMini and lets me
| deploy my own apps on top of. Using tailscale I can access the
| apps from my phone. I have multiple users with their own SSO to
| control access. I even have a pi as part of the network that
| hosts public facing content. All done with Claude Code and
| OpenClaw (as a kind of devops tool)... hardly any code written
| by me. Its been a seriously fun experiment that I will try to
| progress some how.... if only because I love the dream "Digital
| sovereignty" even if the reality is its unlikely to happen
| again. It got me thinking though if I could get inference
| hardware and a good enough open LLM to work with my setup it
| might just be possible. The OP advocates a form of basic
| computing that is understandable but when we are able to host
| our own LLM's we could end up in a very different but more
| capable paradigm.
|
| The repo for homelab anyone who has an interest:
| https://github.com/briancunningham6/homelab
| beders wrote:
| As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and
| who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks,
| HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point.
|
| The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing
| to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most
| likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on
| the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are
| valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have
| severe bandwidth limitations)
|
| For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you
| to run services over their lines. When DSL was around (I guess it
| still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect. ISP
| control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should
| be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet.
|
| The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all
| that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even
| countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of
| the world won't see it.
|
| So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is
| free of back-doors and remote control. There's no guarantee for
| that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just
| ordered might be compromised. We should demand from our
| legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors.
|
| As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that
| allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis
| here other than picking the best tool for the job.
|
| In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free,
| uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the
| first place.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free,
| uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in
| the first place.
|
| We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this
| is never possible.
|
| People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.
| okanat wrote:
| > We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think
| this is never possible.
|
| Where does such informed political and economic interest and
| power exist? With whom do we construct such society? Do they
| have the power and will to fight for it?
|
| Normies live with normie standards and with incresing social
| media exposure with more and more emotional animal-like
| manipulated world views. They are either ignorant or
| ambivalent.
|
| Will tech people gather on a piece of land and declare
| independence? Most of my tech worker colleagues are also
| quite pro-social media and they heavily use it to boost their
| apparent social status. We cannot even trust our kind.
|
| Similar examples of new technology being used to motivate and
| mobilize masses have always ended with devastating wars and
| genocides. Previously the speed of propagation of information
| gave advantages to statespeople like FDR to put an end to
| increasing racism/Nazism/violent tendencies (of course not
| everywhere, when let to its own devices new technology almost
| perfect for constructing dictatorships). Now everybody has
| equal access to misinformation.
| trueno wrote:
| The technology is the easy part, the people are the hard
| part. The reality is that we simply don't have thought
| leaders in charge anymore, there's no innovations or anything
| that are coming to correct course, very few if any channels
| even exist anymore for good ideas to flow upwards that result
| in good & proper solution implementations that positively
| preserve/protect/harden what we want the web to be. I think a
| lot of bright minds who could be solutioning for some of
| these things understand the dynamics at play even if they've
| never taken a huge moment to think about it. Subconsciously
| they are aware that becoming a person to try and steer such a
| big ship would require a monumental exertion that is maybe
| not worth it anymore. The great leaders never actively seek
| out leadership positions, similarly I don't think the people
| who could be good decision makers and influence these types
| of ideals coming to fruition in society actively seek out
| such positions. The possible mental tax of getting there is
| probably enormous. It is not an economic win for anyone to
| take up the mantle of trying to steer ships this size, it is
| a massive sacrifice. People who would be fit for the task
| probably just want to sign off at the end of the day and...
| have a good life and exist/be a benefit in their communities.
| In some ways perhaps that makes them.. unfit for carrying
| this torch. Perhaps there are simply too few people out there
| that are adequately qualified to carry this torch, we are in
| dire need of competent people at the helm of many fronts and
| we simply don't have that, that's just the real life
| variables at play right now.
|
| We plebs are just driftwood floating in massive waves of
| nation state decision making. I don't doubt there are people
| who literally work at ISPs who are depressed at the state of
| things, depressed that theyre not allowed to take action on
| certain things, depressed that they see first-hand what kind
| of control mechanisms they're forced to implement or
| disallowed from implementing and more. It's got to be a trove
| of BS in an age of misinformation which has always been an
| information systems problem that humanity has implemented
| _checks notes_ zero solutions for. And at the end of the day
| they, probably like all of us, just want to live a good and
| meaningful life.
|
| That's not to say just... give up on ideals. But instead to
| acknowledge the realities of ideals not being enough on their
| own. Have some real conversations on what it would actually
| take to embed these types of fundamentals into a society, get
| comfortable with the uncomfortable realities. So much work
| needs to be done before new ideals can even be shared.
| Outreach alone to spread ideals is a massive uphill battle at
| this point due to conglomerate control of broadcast media and
| concentrated ownership of social media apps. A lot of these
| particular ideals require a decent understanding/background
| of technology in general which most people don't even have,
| making these things an incredibly unlikely basis for a
| society where these things are well-enough understood. So the
| circus trick here is how do you make it a digestable topic
| that touches the souls of many and galvanizes them to take
| the correct stance so that these things become embodied in
| the set of ideals a society values, so that legislators and
| whatever other proxies that are tasked with decision making
| give these things the resourcing or policy making attention
| they deserve. That's the mega hard part, which is then
| additionally compounded in difficulty by ... most households
| in our societies just never having these types of discussions
| make it to their TV/computer screens. Hackernews types like
| to call these people "normies" and tack the blame on them,
| but they can't seem to wrap their mind around that not
| everyone could or should have a deep compsci background. We
| should be coexisting with people of a variety of backgrounds
| and instead we should be looking at their "normie"-ness as a
| thing to account for, not blame. It would be absurd to have a
| "normie" expect us to be exceptional at rebuilding car
| engines or any other broad subset of knowledge that we
| haven't ourselves committed our own lives/spare time to.
|
| So that leaves the other route to take which is just...
| renegade fine-we'll-do-it-ourselves. Which can succeed, but
| has its own set of challenges. Fronting infrastructure for a
| lot of stuff is expensive, so donors are needed on sometimes
| vast scales. To another commenters point like... ain't none
| of us on the renegade front laying undersea cables any time
| soon which are multi-billion dollar projects to cross the
| Pacific. Often times we see these underground efforts fail in
| their infancy simply because the UX just flat out sucks and
| we're up against entities who can giga-scale all their
| infrastructure/resources & ultimately capitalize on making
| whatever app thing fast&pleasant for users. It feels like
| we're drowning against titans sometimes, it's overwhelming.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > People can work for a better world. That sometimes works,
| too.
|
| Not when people make arguments based on dreams, hope, and
| optimism.
|
| If somebody tells me that we can build a shed, I want them to
| talk about wood, nails and concrete, or to stop talking.
| glitchc wrote:
| Kumbaya is never a motivator. Now, self-interest, on the
| other hand...
| estimator7292 wrote:
| Spot the American.
|
| Capitalism is not the only way of life, and FYGM is a
| mental illness outside of the US
| warkdarrior wrote:
| What is you preferred socioeconomic system? Any countries
| successfully implementing it so we can copy them?
| nine_k wrote:
| Capitalism does not imply FYGM, nor does it benefit from
| it.
| aerhardt wrote:
| Even in our fabulously wealthy societies, people are mostly
| worried about paying their bills, taking care of their
| families, and putting food on the table, not in getting
| together in a quixotic enterprise and paying for thousands of
| kilometers of communal fiber. Also like in most communist
| utopias what would probably happen is that the control
| infrastructure would be captured by special interest groups
| and now you've traded one evil for another, but in addition
| you're left holding the capex bag and you're poorer for it.
| dollylambda wrote:
| > We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this
| is free of back-doors
|
| In some countries that may be possible (if only for now). Where
| chips are produced makes that an impossibility for most. That
| is, you can have certain guarantees if you run the chip fab,
| although if you are downstream of that, it can be a tall order
| to guarantee your chips are sovereign. So, while I like the
| sentiment that you have some sort of control behind your
| router, I'm really unsure how true that is given the complexity
| of producing modern day chips. Disclaimer, not an expert, just
| an opinion.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I would even say unless you truly have full custody of the
| transportation of components as well, that is unlikely.
| Israel's pager bombs in Lebanon were supplied via a third
| party, not the manufacturer.
| kokanee wrote:
| There's also no hope of creating a web that is resistant to
| enshittification and power consolidation as long as it can
| technically support any form of economic transaction.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| To be fair with fibre to the home rolling out in more and more
| places upstream speeds are improving.
| amlib wrote:
| The upstream bandwidth sure improved but ISPs are still
| hostile to self-hosting by limiting ports, resetting
| connections every x days and not providing an ipv4 for a
| reasonable charge.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables,
| all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even
| countries. If they don 't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest
| of the world won't see it._
|
| Not really having a plan here, so if nothing else this is out
| of curiosity, but I'd like to know who is actually owning that
| stuff.
|
| For something that seems so ubiquitous and familiar like the
| internet, it would probably be good to understand who owns most
| of its infrastructure.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _there 's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored,
| unlimited IP4/6 network back._
|
| What do you mean "back"? It was never free, as in zero-cost. It
| was also not very unlimited; I remember times when I had to pay
| not only for the modem time online, but also for the kilobytes
| transferred. Uncensored, yes, because basically nobody cared,
| and the number of users was relatively minuscule.
|
| The utopia was never in the past, and it remains in the future.
| I still think that staying irrelevant for large crowds and big
| money is key.
| beanjuiceII wrote:
| he literally said "we never had it in the first place"
| shevy-java wrote:
| I welcome everyone who wants to imagine a better web. One with
| less control by greedy mega-corporations and data-sniffing state
| actors. I am not sure how such a web should look, but I am pretty
| certain we will need it sooner or later. Otherwise we may end up
| with "hey, we were in the 1990s generation, we knew a free web -
| now this has been replaced by walled corporate gardens controlled
| by a few superrich".
| mrcwinn wrote:
| This is silly nonsense.
|
| >I publish this site via GitHub Pages
|
| Okay, and that depends on an entire economy and infrastructure of
| privately owned switching, other network equipment, fiber optic,
| etc, etc, etc, -- not to mention that if GitHub did not have, as
| a private company, a profit motive, they wouldn't even bother to
| offer the service you're using.
|
| Sure, yes, rebuild the world but if you want it to be free like
| open source, you'll also need to make it free like beer -- and
| that means you'll need to work for free, too.
|
| I support the aim. I acknowledge the problems. I'm just so
| frustrated by these silly oversimplifications of how to solve it.
| pyrolistical wrote:
| This is all fine and dandy for websites but what we've really
| been locked out of is email.
|
| You can't run your own email server. All other large email
| providers will consider your self hosted emails as spam by
| default. It understandable why they took this stance (due to
| actual spam) but it is also awfully convenient it also increases
| their market power.
|
| We are now at the whim of large corps even if we get a custom
| domain with them.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| one note. Even when we all wrote html most people still used a
| bigco to host it. Maybe if you go back far enough you can say you
| don't think regional ISPs are "big" but those companies are all
| gone now
| ineptech wrote:
| I am on board with basically everything this article is arguing,
| but I think it covers the easy part (that "people run their own
| servers" is the only solution to the problems caused by relying
| on giant ad corps to provide the server half of client/server
| software) and skips the hard part, which is the software they
| run.
|
| Like, suppose some really good personal server software existed.
| Suppose there were an OS-plus-app-repository platform, akin to
| linux plus snapcraft, but aimed solely at people who want to host
| a blog or email server despite knowing nothing and being willing
| to learn nothing. It installs on to a raspberry pi as easy as
| Windows. It figures out how to NAT out of your cable modem for
| you. It does all the disk partitioning and apt-gets and chmods,
| you just open the companion app on your phone and hit the
| Wordpress button and presto, you've got a blog. You hit the
| Minecraft button and you've got your own minecraft server,
| without having to learn what "-Xms2G -Xmx6G" means. It updates
| itself automatically, runs server components in sandboxes so they
| can't compromise each other, and it's crack-proof enough that you
| can store your bitcoins on it. Etc, etc.
|
| If that existed, we wouldn't have to write essays about freedom
| and so forth to get people to buy it, they'd buy it just because
| it's there. I mean, look at those digital picture frames - they
| cost more than a rasbpi and are way less useful, and half the
| people I know got or gave them for christmas. Why? Because
| they're neat and they cost less than a hundred bucks and they
| require no knowledge or effort. If a server that can host your
| blog were that easy, it'd get adopted too, and we'd be on a path
| to some kind of distributed social media FB replacement. Imagine
| the software you could write, if you were allowed to assume that
| every user had a server to host it on!
|
| The problem is, that software doesn't exist and it's not clear
| how it would ever get made. It'd be a huge effort (possibly
| "Google building Android" sized) and the extant open source
| efforts along these lines lack traction, mostly due to the
| chicken-and-egg problem of any new platform that needs apps to be
| useful. And until it exists, any kind of neighborhood-internet-
| collective-power-to-the-people dream has to necessarily begin
| with hoping that millions of people will spontaneously decide to
| spend their precious free time doing systems administration.
|
| Not to shit on a fine essay that I mostly agree with. It just
| seems like, without figuring out the software, this is
| daydreaming.
| sepositus wrote:
| I am in the process of co-founding a new protocol which creates a
| decentralized root of trust using normal plain-text names (i.e.
| `foo.bar`). One of the goals I hope to obtain is allowing domain-
| style lookups of private websites hosted on P2P networks. It's
| lofty, but the dialog used by OP is _very_ close to why I think
| it's necessary.
| Cieric wrote:
| I've been interested in doing something similar in the past,
| but I could really never solve issues like domain squatting and
| stopping individuals from claiming every name possible. Do you
| have a place where you keep these plans or have discussions
| around it? Or even just a place where I could get updates if
| anything does come of it?
| sepositus wrote:
| > I've been interested in doing something similar in the
| past, but I could really never solve issues like domain
| squatting and stopping individuals from claiming every name
| possible
|
| I think that's just a property of a naming system. Without
| something like a centralized threat of force that can know
| every person participating in the system - there really is no
| recourse. The approach we are taking is making it difficult
| to create a speculative market around names which seems to be
| the driving force behind squatters.
|
| Happy to discuss it in more detail: hackernews@sepositus.com
|
| (Note: that's an alias that goes to my email address which I
| avoid putting in public places for obvious reasons).
| anon291 wrote:
| Have you considered improving ygddrasil or something similar.
| sepositus wrote:
| Yes, the protocol is going to be open and the plan is to
| submit PRs to various projects when we're at that point. It's
| not really an "either or" with ygddrasil but more like a
| "both and."
| hirako2000 wrote:
| A web we own better mobile responsive.
| procflora wrote:
| The cynic in me wants to say that most of the web these days is
| pushing H.264 frames from a CDN to proprietary phone apps and the
| rest is pushing Widevine video from the same CDN to proprietary
| browsers and we'll never cooperatively own any of that, even if
| we wanted to.
|
| The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use
| publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-
| hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations
| realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet,
| collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate
| apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty
| pessimistic, but then it is Monday.
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