Comment by losteric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by losteric | Hacker News Reader

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Amazon and Facebook, to me, are symptoms of a deeper problem: Technology is still hard. We're building complex large-scale products because the non-technical consumers can't use the simple small-scale products.

We're here because it's convenient, not because it's good.

I always felt that Google should have created simple tools for web publishing and creating personal walled-gardens - make the web personal for 7 billion non-technical humans, and the brands they consume. Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo.

G+ copied Facebook when they should have studied why people were using Facebook instead of the open web. Don't make the problem worse, fixed those problems; take the role of guardian of the internet. Create or support standard APIs, release relevant IP/research, and bankroll SV startups that build the tools to publish or consume through the open web.

Google is still an ad/search company that relies on the open web. They need to protect it and drive further innovation. What happens after the coming adpocalypse - micropayments? Subscription bundles? Who knows? Or, perhaps we'll be chained to ads forever because we'll be locked into walled-garden apps... what a hell that would be.

Are there any companies working in this space? Closest I've seen is Squarespace, and even then... not really...

> Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo.

I guess Wordpress is an example. It's got a hosted plan, which requires little more computer literacy than Facebook, and you can also leave at any time and self-host the software, which keeps the hosted offering honest. But it's just not as contagious as something like Facebook. That's the problem, Facebook isn't just more 'convenient' than self-hosted tools, it also has your friends tagging you in photos.

I'd argue that, in terms of features, Wordpress is little better than Jekyll/Hugo. Social integration is the aspect that's missing. Chat, access control, tagging, push/pull update, etc.

I envision this is a two part problem: the "back-end", one-click install or oauth register services to create your private space and identity (possibly a VPS or agglomeration of AWS services) for sending/receiving emails, direct messages, tags (push), and friend posts, group updates, news subscriptions (pull), plus APIs for search, access control, creating/managing your own content, so on; and the front-end, a glorified RSS reader for using the above services through standard APIs.

That's the challenge. The solution is way more complex then the existing offerings, like WP or other simple blogs, but all that complexity must be buried away so it's at least as easy as registering to Facebook.

It's possible, all of the constituent problems have been tackled separately... what's lacking is a unified standard, comprehensive tools, and stable (corporate) backing.

and I kinda wonder how much of this ultimately falls on ISPs for not building out high speed internet... it's not inconceivable to imagine an always on "social network" box, or more options for home servers

> Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo.

There's an effort to try and build some standards for open web sharing at indieweb.org - cross-post comments, syndication to existing social networks. A few of those standards have now been given the W3C stamp (MicroPub, WebMention).

There's some services built on top of it like WithKnown, MicroBlog and people building on top of WordPress, building their own site and so on.

The founding principle of that community (build what fixes your problem, don't try and solve everyone's problems) keeps it quite well focussed.

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