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hsn915

As others have pointed out, there's currently no solution that allows common people to self host.

There's a minimum level of linux/sysadmin/devops expertise requried to setup and maintain a self hosted website.

I've written a somewhat long essay about this problem:

https://hasen.substack.com/simple-self-hosting

A solution is possible but no one is working on it yet as far as I can tell.

Instead, everyone wants to make money by taking offline/local applications and turning them into online/cloud applications (even if no specific capability is gained by being on the cloud) just because it's easier to make more money that way.

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> here's currently no solution that allows common people to self host.

And there sure as hell should be!

These days, a lot of people seem to be capable of installing a Linux OS on their machines. Their questions and problems have gotten a lot more sophisticated in recent years. A simple site should be hella easier.

I don't understand why such a basic and simple thing hasn't shown-up yet. I constantly run across people that aren't worried about money, just getting text and photos on a simple page and getting them online. The money thing could be a plug-in or something. A Webring plug-in would probably interest more people right away.

They haven't shown up because non-tech people don't demand it. They cave in and use one of the managed solutions like wordpress dot com, squarespace etc. A group of devs need to create a solution even without demand & set about popularising it, which is very hard, when most people are satisfied with cloud solutions and don't see the danger that their data could be lost or vendor captured or censored arbitrarily. The second issue is network effects, where these cloud services provide exposure to your content and provide you exposure to related content, which as a self hoster, you must do for yourself.

Combined, both problems seem to be remarkably hard when viewed at closeup detail, especially when pitched to "point and click" users with minimal willingness to hack at the command line.

The command line is half the problem. The solution should not require command line chops. Should just be a GUI.

One of the simplest combination of solutions that I know in this space is to use Publii CMS to compose your blog and push it to GitHub Pages, which automagically makes your SSL enabled site live. Of course something as trivial as adding your custom domain leads you down a rabbit hole of nameservers, CDN etc. There is probably a simpler path here I'm missing.

But the bigger problem is the non-tech world simply doesn't know about any of this. When they want a site, they straightaway consider Blogger vs Wordpress vs SquareSpace vs Wix vs Shopify. Or just a FB/Instagram Page. In fact the latter often comes before the dedicated sites since you depend on them for networking.

It's a hard problem: how to be fully decentralised, yet connected/indexed/searchable, secure, yet flexible... and all this with sensible defaults and point-and-click to onboard lay people without scaring them away.

Publii is a good one but it lacks proper marketing. It's just not promoted enough. It also does not have a mobile app, and don't support pages. It could be a good solution for non-tech people that want to own their space and can't spend too much money/time, but it would need to change substantially for that to happen.

I never heard of it, but having taken a look it just seems like a GUI variant of Hugo. Which is nice and all, but nowhere near what I'm talking about.

Generating static sites is popular specifically because the root problem is not solved: hosting and maintaining a website is often a nightmare.

Have you seen cloudron.io? They are spot on solving the problem you describe

It does not seem to even be the same ball park.

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