Known: A collaborative social publishing engine | Hacker News Reader

Known: A collaborative social publishing engine

withknown.com

45 pointsTomte24 comments

The web site comes up with White on White text, can't read it.

A better link that routes around the marketing is their GitHub repo

Do you have JavaScript disabled or something? It loads just fine here

This looks so cool! Also really interesting to me that it's written in PHP. Is PHP still the leading tool for applications like this, nearly 20 years after WordPress first came out?

It has existed for some years. Watching the Twit episode linked to from the website... that takes you back to 2014. https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-google/episodes/266 (skip 22 minutes)

PHP is still the only language on the web you can deploy to a $5/mo host with a zipfile without needing wade through Docker, Git, the command line, token management, etc. My dad can install this for the middle school he teaches at. You couldn't say the same thing for a Node app.

Exactly this. Everytime I start a new project and I think between PHP and Python (Django), the fact that I can throw the PHP one into any cheap server is very very convenient. Someone should do a Python/Django managed hosting.

Interesting take. In all seriousness, is there a way to integrate other languages with this pipeline or with this level of simplicity i wonder?

Eg, i prefer my language of choice. However i am personally focused on self hosting, so being "just as easy as PHP" seems useful.

I tend to ship self contained binaries that can run on your computer without configuration. While that would work on a web host it's not going to restart automatically or have any integration with old school PHP focused providers. Has anyone heard of a PHP bridge for this sort of thing? Perhaps I make a version of this app that works under CGI (or w/e)? But then you still have to know "Do i want the binary? Or the CGI? What the hell is CGI anyway?" etc.

I don't see why a Docker container with an app using your language of choice would be hard to run off a $5 hosting. You don't even need Docker; Podman or even systemd can run your container (or several). You still normally need to configure a Web server in front of it to handle HTTPS, but same applies to PHP.

The target market includes people who do not configure web servers. They purchase monthly access to one pre-configured. Eg https://www.hostgator.com/

Respectfully disagree. Go is another one: while used more for pure APIs, it's definitely able to produce single-file executables which serve HTML.

(Technically the same is true about Rust and Haskell, but the amount of programming mastery required for them is slightly larger.)

Not sure that means Go "can deploy to a $5/mo host with a zipfile without needing wade through Docker, Git, the command line, token management, etc."

You can put the code and all the resources into a single Go executable, which exposes an HTTP interface. No need even for a zip file.

It can also watch its own executable and restart if it changes, so that you would only need to scp a new executable, just as with PHP. (I would still use entr instead.)

Can you explain how to deploy a single-binary web service for $5/mo alongside an existing website using only GUI tools to someone with no knowledge of POSIX concepts like “processes” and “ports”? Much less tweaking the behavior of such software…

Reminds me of that famous HN Dropbox comment. "What's the point of Dropbox? As anyone knows, it's trivial to set up such a service, simply ssh a port into a Linux and a28$-$72;ajaiwh28sjeuw!27$+_;" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Software engineers have a way of becoming completely oblivious to all the technical details they've gotten used to over the years.

Yes, it gets a bad rap by communities like this one but PHP is still one of the leading tools for modern rapid web-driven application development.

I guess it depends if the application is a SPA or not. SPAs are usually mostly JavaScript with little server-side code.

Founder here! AMA.

Is this in use anywhere, by anyone? Isn’t that the very first question any open source project should anticipate?

I’ve definitely let the project fall quiet, but I’m planning on spending more time on it. I use it on my own site at https://werd.io and there are quite a few others.

an issue to add ActivityPub support is one thing I'd look at longingly:

https://github.com/idno/known/issues/2615

Wow a $3000 bounty on that one too. If this is achievable within a week of full time work, that's the equivalent of a 150k salary

It likely is, and I’m serious about paying it!

Things like this make me hopeful for the future of open source. Thank you for helping pave the way

Thank you! Hoping to be a part of the solution.

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