If Facebook Threatens the Web, then WordPress Saved the Web | Hacker News Reader

If Facebook Threatens the Web, then WordPress Saved the Web

marcgrabanski.com

38 pointsgrabanski10 comments

After reading Tim Berners-Lee’s writings on how Facebook threatens the future of the web it occurred to me just how in the reverse argument is also true...projects like WordPress actually saved the web up until now by saving the intellectual property of millions of content publishers.

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We're never going to convince regular people to run their own Diaspora server. I mean, look at this:

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Installing-and-Run...

Even Wordpress is increasingly becoming a huge liability for someone who isn't a sysadmin to run. Telling a non-geek friend to use a self-hosted Wordpress install to host their personal blog strikes me as incredibly irresponsible in the same way that jailbreaking/rooting a non-geek's smartphone would be doing them a huge disservice. Nobody should be self-hosting unless they know exactly what they're committing to. I'd much rather they use a hosted platform with a good export mechanism than use wordpress, see their site hacked using a zero-day export, and completely lose faith in "openness".

Data portability is something that average people can understand, something that sites can implement fairly easily, and something that's compatible with how regular people use computers. If geeks push self-hosting, they risk completely losing their credibility with regular people in the same way that the FSF has. Data portability might not be as sexy, but it's something that we have a chance of seeing through.

There's a reason why people used closed systems like Facebook, and it's not ignorance—it's convenience and quality. People aren't going to move away from these systems for the sake of "openness", but they might be convinced to push companies to implement true data portability if we can convince them why it's important.

Maintaining a self-hosted WordPress installation is awfully easy since they added the one-click updating for plugins and WordPress itself. I agree that a neglected WordPress install is a liability, but it takes negligible effort to keep later versions of it running smoothly. Even "normals" can handle clicking an update button once in a while when they log into their dashboard to check comments, stats, etc.

But "normals" just aren't always going to do that. If Wordpress installations automatically updated without any user intervention, then maybe it would be better, but I still think it's dangerous to get non-geek friends to use a self-hosted Wordpress unless they really understand server administration—not just following an installation guide, but how permissions work, how to back up databases, how to properly vet add-ons, etc.

Plus, a lot of the Wordpress exploits have been zero-day. Even if they are checking their Wordpress dashboard every day, or even every week (and that's probably not a good assumption to make), their installation could be silently compromised before an update was even available.

I think geeks tend to assume that regular people understand and care about even the most basic (by our estimation) best practices. You could argue that that's their fault, not ours, but I think there's a certain lack of pragmatism involved in thinking that regular users can responsibly administer a Wordpress install. I'm sure contrary examples exist, but there's a lot of horror stories as well.

It is pretty easy, but publishing is divided into two areas:

Personal publishing where wordpress.com (and posterous, tumblr,etc.) are the best use case.

Professional publishing where Wordpress self installs are the best.

Running servers will become easier. And it could be optional - you can also just get a blog on Wordpress.com after all.

But then it's not self-hosted, and really isn't substantively different than using Posterous, Tumblr, or really even Facebook (provided that Facebook exports notes).

The advantage really isn't in the ability to self-host. It's in the ability to find alternative hosts (ie, not a single point of control).

Pushing companies like Facebook to implement data portability is a great thing, but these companies want to maintain copyright control and that is apparent by their actions.

Since it doesn't look like these companies will give up copyrights anytime soon, I chose to promote self-hosting with WordPress so heavily because it is one of the only proven and relatively easy methods I know that provides publishers with complete control over the content they produce. Millions and millions of articles have been kept in the rightful hands because of WordPress and similar open, self-hosted publishing tools.

I think more people will chose to self-host if they are aware of the consequences and it is easy for them to do, which WordPress is probably the best we have to promote for now.

Eventually I'd to promote a viable and open alternative to Facebook, but nothing like that exists yet.

> Nobody should be self-hosting unless they know exactly what they're committing to.

it is just a FUD. Self-hosting can be done in a range of options - starting with your personal webserver on your own home or collocated computer (geek) to the pages personalized with your domain name on some common hosted and managed _open_ platform like wordpress, etc... (regular, non-geek person)

The issue isn't about technicalities of hosting or data portability. It is about content ownership. What FB does is "all you base are belong to us".

My related post on similar issue about giving away reviews to sites likes Yelp http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1898945

Edit : this post is actually a reply to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1943861

I think Facebook/Twitter are basically just blogs with inbuilt blog readers, and a beefed up blog roll. Isn't that why Tumbler seems to be taking off suddenly?

Funny how much of a difference subtle details of implementation can make.

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