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Comment by bwb | Hacker News Reader

This is so crazy, I love the idea but the world isn't going back to how it was in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I've been in web hosting for a long time and I love the idea of everyone creating their own little website. The truth is people don't have the skills or care enough to do something like that, FB, Quora, Twitter, all these services that are walled gardens work because they make it EASY to share/create and CONNECT people easily with others and easy to use apps that do x. WordPress is about the closest you get and it is a nightmare to manage and $$$ on the hosting side compared to closed gardens.

We need to just accept the new world and keep innovating inside it, there isn't going back to how it was.

And stop this nonsense about privacy, either pass a big federal law or accept that your info is how free sites are funded :).

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I agree with your comments except for (respectfully) the part about: "We need to just accept the new world..." I firmly think this all represents opportunity. Opportunity for technologists to develop open platforms that are NOT cumbersome to setup nor to host by the layperson, and that - at least over some time - are extremely inexpensive. Maybe i'm an optimist, but i firmly believe there will be an open platform - or multiple complimentary open platforms working in concert - which will fill all of these needs (independence of/control of online presence, privacy, networking opportunities, etc.). I don't think we should merely accept this fate. For the technologists who read hacker news, I think all of this should be a call to arms - or better said a call to service. What is that phrase I've heard, something about being the change you want to see in the world?

Totally agree, I just don't want people to think it is going back to what it was in the late 90s and getting trapped thinking that was some type of golden age. Going forward there is tremendous opportunity to do new things that give people the ability to express themselves online.

Yep, understood.

The thing about social media which is slightly different from everyone having their own site (tripod, geocities ..) is that its more interactive.

There is some messaging built into the "new social" that wasn't as available back then (we didn't all have smart phones, and internet was charged by the hour.). There wasn't as much content either which did make it slightly more manageable to surf through the pages you wanted.

polite and interesting exchange though.

Yeah it's funny; I remember back when blogs first became popular, but before comments-on-posts was a common thing. Most community and discussion happened on message boards or newsgroups (whenever a link to said link was posted). That's what led to the backlink (quickly taken advantage of by spammers), which led to the on-premise comment thread.

My sentiments exactly. Well-said. I've experimented with distributed/decentralized social tools as they've come along since back to 2005 or so and even tried my hand at making "easy" interfaces to them. So far, it's all exciting but nothing has stuck in a way that looked mainstream to me. Nonetheless, I still have a lot of energy for it because I think something will come together.

Except having a legitimate personal website is a challenge you can't automate away. Even if you managed to produce a rugged installer script for, say, Mastodon so you can one click deploy a working instance you still need to somehow A. get a domain and B. host it somewhere that will stay online for others to use.

There is no real way to automate domain procurement.

Most people don't leave a PC they own all the time to run a website.

So you end up hosting it. But now its centralizing again. If everyone were hosting their own mastodon instances on the same cloud provider thats barely any different from that cloud provider being a Facebook with all the data access they have. Even with a federated site like that few simply have a computer to leave on all the time to have their own site, let alone asking your average person to setup dynamic dns records if they did.

The fundamental name system of the Internet is too manual to enable average people to have personal sites. And any solution involves centralization which defeats the exercise.

Wha? I leave my PCs on for years at a time. Except for natural disasters (storms, cut power lines) they operate 24X365. A personal website is pretty straightforward.

I think its pretty straightforward to host things yourself.

> I think its pretty straightforward to host things yourself.

Said as a true developer who no longer realizes how hard some of the things we do are to the average person who can barely operate their computer or smart phone.

Think of all the things you have to learn in order to host your own site. I still have to explain the basics of what a domain name is to potential freelance customers, and why they need hosting in order to have a website online. This is knowledge that is not common outside of the developer ecosystem.

lol ... this seems to be a theme today in several different threads. Literally anyone on this website should take their own behavior as the opposite of what they assume the average user can or will do.

I honestly can't with the HN crowd at times. The problem with a bubble is you often don't realize you're in one.

Is the bandwidth on a typical home ISP connection really viable for serving a website, and don't most ISPs forbid customers running servers on their accounts?

You would only (in this example) need enough bandwidth to satisfy the traffic of your immediate friends and family you interact with online.

Your IM client is already doing that.

You are not the average Joe.

Really my standing is that what we need to accept is different - that it is okay to be a technically sophisticated niche but that it will certainly have lesser traffic. That sort of experience is much of what people bemoan about with the 'old internet' anyway.

The internet is built for that sort of specialization anyway - it isn't a pure broadcast medium in the first place so accept that it isn't all conglomerates - if you don't want it for profit in the first place you don't need the crowds.

I can see potentially setting up a good 'seed kit' to distribute but generally they've had the trap of being too technically sophisticated for the lowest level and too simple for those with more expertise.

It is probably more hard on a social level than a technical level given things like UX consistency. Not to mention the infamous 'classic angelfire 90s website' tackiness that nobody tends to want to visit anyway.

Who is talking about going back technologically, though?

    Before the sponsored updates. 
    Before the terms of service changed. 
    Before data stopped being private. 
    Before we sold our memories. 
    Before we forgot our rights. 
    Before everything that made media 
    Less social and more cynical, 
    There was one simple idea: 
    Our lives are our own. 
    What we share and who we share it with, 
    Our memories, our secrets, 
    Our lives are our own. 
    That idea is important 
    So we’re going back to before. 
    And in going back to before, 
    We’re going forward.

from https://tent.io/ which now displays this poem instead:

> Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue

The idea is still valid IMO. I don't care about "the world", that's just a word; the internet worked fine when there wasn't even 100 million people using it, so a better web doesn't have to be used by everybody, either.

This is basically what myspace used to be. People decided the well organised, in seperate data-pieces and better presented Facebook way was the preference. How little did they know that well organised data can lead to where we are now...

The article mentions how Myspace wasn't able to monetize its users as well as data-driven Facebook does. I wonder if 2006's Myspace could have survived if given more mature toolchains for users' pages to not look as though they were made by a teenager. Or Facebook made an early decision that having less customization is better for growing a userbase such that people will use a service with posts in a format they can be more familiar with across all pages.

Ehh, wordpress is a mis-step along our path of digital expression. There's this new thing called flat HTML files that are very easy to maintain and much more flexible (and secure). If you don't mind a complete mess, like me :P

I miss messy 90s sites

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