The OG Social Network: Other People’s Websites
blog.jim-nielsen.com
blog.jim-nielsen.com
Unfortunately, it's not easy to make an easy personal website today. Personal sites take so much work to design, and most feel stale because they don't have dynamic content like posts. About.me used to be great, but it didn't get maintained.
I'm working on a project to make personal websites as easy to set up as a social profile. No designs to pick - just a photo and profile photo. Not static - you have a mailing list and the latest post is shown on the homepage. And, people can "follow" with their emails.
Facebook used to be pitched as "the place everybody is", but that's no longer true - social networks are getting dis-aggregated. So, I expect personal sites to become a way for people to gain more control over their audiences, and to help move an audience from one platform to another (via a "link in bio" to their personal sites)
If you're interested in trying out my project for your own site:
(Will trade free access for feedback!)
Wordpress isn't built for personal sites. Too many themes, too hard to set up, too much overhead. I think most people that want a personal site are not motivated to figure out the whole process of finding a template, designing the pages, configuring all the content sections, etc. Plus, Wordpress doesn't have an easy mailing list tool built-in.
There's plenty of turnkey mailing list plugins for WordPress, from Jetpack to using SendGrid, or MailChimp, all of which have free plans.
That's what prompted me to start Postcard. I had a blog set up, and I wanted an integrated mailing list. It took XML hacking (RSS), $30/month to Convertkit, and lots of complexity to make it "just work". I wanted something far simpler, and built for people instead of marketing organizations.
Finally, my makefile does an “s3 sync”.
The older and more boring, the better.
(I'm also using this stack for managing Terms of Service on https://contraption.co and that project is open: https://github.com/contraptionco/contraption.co )
I found myself forgetting how static site generators work, and barely used any features. I update my site like once a year.
Idk its in the JS ecosystem so HN will probably hate it lol.
Not my style, but it's your site so do it your way.
People also inevitably end up forgetting how to use their static site generator setup. (Even in your "boring" example with "just" make, you will perhaps forget the templating language.) A ripe case fit for field study: <https://web.archive.org/web/20210331182731/https://corythebo...>
> So, time to update the website, but the first wall I hit was that I: ¶1. Forgot how my over-engineered SaaS was supposed to be used (no documentation because I built it myself and was lazy) ¶2. Forgot how to follow the esoteric Hugo conventions (has documentation, but it's not easy to parse at a glance)
> I was pretty annoyed with myself for having fallen for the trap of not documenting my own systems, but not sure how I could have remembered all of the Hugo-isms, especially since I don't update this site very often and don't do static site generator work outside of this.
If think you want to use a static site generator, first try just making your site capable of self-replication. Write a document that lists all the transformation steps that should be applied to the input in order to produce the desired output, save that as something like makesite.html, dump it somewhere on your site, and have it so that when you drag and drop the directory containing your site sources onto the page, then it spits the publishable version back out. (Just make it so that your makesite.html is written for a dumb enough audience that your computer (read: Web browser) can follow the steps on its own.)
Alternatively, don't use a static site generator. Adopt a regimen where the publishable representation (what would be the SSG's output) is also the canonical representation (i.e. "source").
Best of all, Sendfox costs a tiny fraction of what ConvertKit does and it’s run by a more technical team.
I imagine users would go to one site (or app) to get it all running, and that site would hook them up with hosting and a domain name behind the scenes, maybe get them set up with a static page through a WYSIWYG editor, then boom done. Maybe give users a standalone app with their hosting keys and credentials that lets them update the content on their site directly (again through WYSIWYG, like Adobe Dreamwaver but easier), without going back to the initial setup site.
A platform or service that handholds users through initial setup and billing, and then steps away once they're up and running, seems to me like the right mix of centralized/devolved control and responsbility. I realize what I'm describing sounds a lot like Wordpress or Dreamwaver, but I think there's a big opportunity to slim down these offerings into a simple, secure, easy-to-use package. I guess it depends on your choice of target audience.
With Postcard - I've had to add various checks and protections to prevent bot abuse (and to manage sender reputation). It would be really hard to be reactive like that on a self-hosted product.
I imagine it would be easier for the completely self-hosted email system if signup gave receivers a from-address they could whitelist, if their email provider allows it. Maybe you already do this.
Edit: I'm also assuming email is sent one-way to whoever signs up, maybe with a link to the dynamic chat server/app/platform of the moment. Slightly different from a GNU Mailman list, which enables back-and-forth conversation.
> I imagine it would be easier for the completely self-hosted email system if signup gave receivers a from-address they could whitelist, if their email provider allows it. Maybe you already do this.
Yeah, that could be possible. I'm not opposed to releasing a self-hosted version of Postcard - but it's been useful to not have that constraint from the beginning. For instance, email sending happens in an async queue backed by Redis - and that might just be unnecessarily complex for a self-hosted tool!
Right from the get go, long-term maintainability of such a platform is very hard, as there are now a few dependencies that you're reliant upon for your self-hosted site:
- Domain registrar
- Infrastructure provider (IaaS)
- DNS record management
Trying to make the providers swappable will be a challenge, as APIs are not consistent across the ecosystem. This is compounded when trying to make the solution turn-key, as now there needs to be a developmental effort behind the project to keep it up to date, & to add in new options to swap the providers out.
> I realize what I'm describing sounds a lot like Wordpress or Dreamwaver, but I think there's a big opportunity to slim down these offerings into a simple, secure, easy-to-use package.
The pennies that can be picked up in this specific niche is too small to bother: The ones that just want a website without any frills will stick to WordPress & their providers, while those wanting extreme configurations & customizability will just run their own language/framework on the infra of their own choosing. The niche mentioned sits in between the two, with the extreme ends increasing their grasps: WordPress plugins from the easy end, and web frameworks from the other end (Vue, React, Svelte, Django, etc.).
**This kind of thinking, however, misses the forest in favor of nostalgia: The vast majority of modern Internet audiences want fast & easy discoverability/search, along with easy public sharing of posts, & account follows. Modern social media is what results from the inevitable result of catering to the market's demands. Such market wants also inevitably creates gravitational pulls towards platforms with large audiences, creating a feedback loop that's hard to break.**
Right now, there's a weak-but-present desire to decouple from Big Social Media (Mastadon, Lemmy, Friendica), but the wants of the modern audience run against the ideals of self-hosted social media taking off: Their customizability is their own Achilles Heel, with the technical & financial limitations of scaling self-hosted services making it near impossible to compete with the big guys.
There's nothing stopping personal sites from interacting with Fediverse standards. Then posting to your site is just a matter of inputing it as your home "server" in your preferred Fediverse app.
I would like to host my occasional posts and photos on my own site. But I don't want to post everything publically.
But requiring people to sign up to my personal website is probably unreasonable. And requiring a login implies a DB of some kind, which for me transforms it from fun into work.
I'm also not going to get excited about anything that isn't self-hosted. Sooner or later every cool startup either fails or becomes successful enough that their incentives no longer align with my interests.
If your audience could accept the basic look of it, basic auth + https will work. You can automate the creation of a new entry in the passwords file and the restart of the web server.
Just a feature suggestion, can you please make it easy for people to setup RSS feeds?
Email-to-RSS solutions exist for technical people, but first party platform support for RSS will determine whether a significant minority of the nontechnical-but-literate internet (i.e. people who mostly consume and occasionally produce text) will adopt your service as a consumer.
Wordpress, for example, generates RSS feeds by default at a predictable url. Same with blogspot, hugo, ghost, and even substack.
Best of luck!
Huh? My definition of a personal website differs mightily from yours. Today, neocities.org and a day spent learning how to write simple HTML suffices. Fact is, I'm getting ready to do this once again myself. And I can email my friends (you know -- real friends) with a link. And I've found Google to be quite good at quickly adding my site to their databases. I can always find my sites using sensible search terms in Google.
A personal website should not look like a corporate website, or like MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter (well, unless that's your obsession).
I find that a little HTML, the tiniest bit of CSS -- say 15-lines or less, some images/diagrams, and most importantly, something honest and interesting to say, is about all that's required.
The use of Pandoc can make writing HTML almost trivial, but then writing plain HTML is almost trivial anyway, even with Notepad. A personal website is not a place to track visitors, or to manipulate them with "Please Subscribe" membership assaults upon them. It's personal, it's right there in the name. By personal, I don't mean it's where you spill your guts about yourself (although, if you want, you can). It can even be a subtle ad, emphasis on subtle, for your work. Will the real John D. Cook, please stand up?
But why, in the name of all that's precious, does it have to be complicated? That's a rhetorical question, whose answer is, obviously, "It doesn't."
And about this dis-aggregated business, this "gain more control over their audiences..." stuff, that doesn't sound so personal to me.
I suspect many folks would gladly visit stale-looking sites that don't torment them with drop-down (and over) videos, and membership pleas 5-seconds after they begin reading the content they really came for. And on many sites, the absence of a comment section would be a blessing indeed -- the vitriol of the internet knows no bounds, and just being exposed to that stuff can sometimes send your mind down Negative Nellie Lane.
So to any non-technical readers who would like to create a simple site to say something they've been wanting to say to no one, someone, or everyone, I say give Neocities, or something similar a try. Wait a week, search Google for your site. Feel special. It's fun!
Linkedin sucks as a resume.
The fact was...people didn't care. It made building harder...not easier.
I think it's inevitable. Over time, adoption trends towards easy UX, and open standards almost by their nature lag behind silos in their ability to optimize experience.
- WebMention, a W3C standard that is basically the equivalent of @ing someone on Twitter [1]. It is simply an http request to a discoverable endpoint with two pieces of data: the webpage being mentioned, and the webpage mentioning it. WordPress had a similar standard called Pingback and websites supporting WebMention often support both for backwards compatibility. - microformats2, an ad-hoc standard for adding metadata to webpages, meant especially for providing metadata for web mentions [2]. For instance, you can specify that the mention is a "like", "reply", or "reblog", and set the author name and avatar.
Independent websites that add support for this can then parse the WebMention to create a comment section and like counter and readers can follow the links to other blogs that talk about the blog post they just read. There are a decent number of personal sites that already support this, like those mentioned in [3]. With enough adapters, it might build the network effects necessary to become a viable social media alternative. Right now though, those in the network are predominantly tech oriented since there isn't a ton of third party support.
[0]: https://indieweb.org/ [1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/ [2]: http://microformats.org/ [3]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention#IndieWeb_Examples
It might’ve lost popularity over the years but it amazed me that there’s still entire micro-communities of authors/fans doing this. Their own little social networks, all self hosted and self managed through blogs and comments/Pingbacks.
I get Thinking About Things, which points me to interesting sites on the internet (https://thinking-about-things.com/). Another great one is Findka essays (https://essays.findka.com/). Would love to hear any other recommendations.
alternatively, the bookmarks/links page to mine has a hefty list of artist-focused sites (http://kradeelav.com/link.html), and the yesterweb webring has enough to get you going in the fun quirky webrings - https://links.yesterweb.org/
We really need a replacement for Yahoo.
Which takes me to a broken article: https://www.aaronkharris.com/asking-questions
If I search "presstv", the .com site of which was literally seized by the US govt, I get their unseizable .ir site as the first result. No scary warnings, no fluff.
If I search "rt", I get RT site as the first result.
Similarly for smaller sites that have caught flak or been banned for opposing US government narratives (SCF, CN, GZ, etc).
Ironically, it's "open" platforms like Wikipedia that have the lowest tolerance for political dissent. Twitter, Facebook are quite compromised as well.
Then, the pro-Russian-propaganda outlets got upset and started complaining about free speech. (As though exclusively showing sites from one hostile foreign government would be aligned with the intent of the 1st amendment!)
I mostly use Yandex now. It's not great.
Peculiarly, I have found the more 'genuine' websites by using image search. Perhaps because more things fit into a grid, and I can usually gauge whether the website is genuine or a botfarm from the images its author chose.
> They provide the tools – Reader, Blogger, Search — we provide the personal websites. The open, accessible, indexable web as The Next Great Social Network.
I think this confuses the chronology. It's not that Google drove people away from a decentralized social web by killing Reader. It's that users had already abandoned the web in favor of walled gardens like Facebook.
I think that Google should have kept Reader around largely for PR and goodwill reasons, but it was niche product being used by a small and dwindling (but fervent!) set of users. RSS was not a meaningful "social network" for any significant fraction of humanity. I would bet money that for every person who has ever written a blog post, there are 10,000+ people who have posted on Facebook or Instagram.
Google could have kept the lights on with Reader but it would have been a well-lit but empty room.
At the same time, though, the value proposition of a social networks & media isn't linear with user volume. There's always a floor beneath which the value isn't there, but once you meet that bar there's different kinds of value available depending on who is participating, what kind of effort they're putting into contributions, and maybe even value presented by limitations/exclusivity.
The Reader / Blogger infra could have been an effort to focus on high value networks vs high volume networks. Which, you could argue, is exactly what the value proposition of Google's core product (search) was in the first place.
Blogs still aren't an empty room, so I think the floor would have always been there.
Facebook and Instagram know a lot about which cat memes my friends and I send back and forth to each other.
In contrast, my RSS feed knows a lot about what content I think is valuable to consume in my spare cycles. I would never get in ad in Instagram for anything software-related, but that's at least 1/2 of my RSS feed, and something I'm more likely to spend money for than whatever cat toy they think will cause me to pry open my wallet.
I think if somebody could choose the highest-signal metadata to get to know me well, they should choose my browser/search history, my RSS reader, my e-reader, and iMessage or the corporate Slack instance.
Anything else is tangential at best. I have no idea why they shut down Google Reader, it's clearly the best signal:noise product outside of Maps and Search.
Maybe with the prevalence of google analytics and device/id fingerprinting, they thought it was redundant data.
Everyone who says this says it as if we've reached an agreement that when we're talking about RSS we're specifically excluding podcasts. I don't know why we're doing that. The podcasting ecosystem comprises a hugely successful social network (despite the shortcomings of the podcast syndication format—which could be alleviated by more pressure to transition to something more modern, like Atom, which already includes features that would make it possible to unlock even more of the types of things expected nowadays from social networks).
I agree with the first part, individual websites are the OG social network. The second, though, that the "social" web will lean towards individual websites seems dubious.
The more "individuality" a given medium enables, the more complexity and therefore, difficulty. Most people want to just share photos and lulz with their friends, and the the landscape of social walled gardens are all trying to tap this demand.
[1]: https://github.com/Reeywhaar/want-my-rss [2]: https://www.rssboard.org/rss-autodiscovery
Can you imagine Firefox having such a button without the need for a plugin. That would be crazy, wouldn't it?
Imagine what an aspiring content creator (writer, photographer, artist, musician etc) needs to master and navigate in order to get his own social network website up: domain names, ssl, html css javascript, image editing, comments, categories and tags, rss, pings, moderating, email, mail lists, analytics, pagerank, seo, search, translate, etc. Each with different backends, different logins, different degree of tech knowledge required.
As walled gardens like FB and Myspace grew in capabilities, why didn't the blog platforms and website builders grow their design to simplify the onboarding as well? This is probably the result of venture money sucking all the best engineering talents away from the open source and free platforms..
I remember distinctly, in early 2000 trying to help a friend to create his own web site to be a museum of his life's work of writing. After trying to teach him all the underlying web infrastructures and technologies, he came to the conclusion he should just hire a web consultant.
Walled gardens simplified the chores of posting online, and they do a very good job for millions of non-techies. Without this huge step, we would have lost even more creative output from the past 20 years.
Not sure I understood you correctly but isn't this exactly what e.g. WordPress did - and pretty darn well too?
I thought we were discussing personal sites. Why does a personal site need analytics?
I'm not sure what "pagerank" means, unless it's SEO specifically for Goo.
SEO in the sense of reasonable page design, comes for free with a builder like Wordpress. Other kinds of SEO are for scammers and the get-rich-quick brigade.
Search is cool; but translate, for a personal site? Is it too much to expect visitors that don't know your language, but want to use your site, to resort to an online translator? You could even link to it.
I would like to see Search Engine Optimization ended with extreme prejudice.
No search engines are immune, but Goog is the epitome of of SEO taking over the first few pages, destroying the "information" that they want to make "universally accessible and useful".
I am also seeing search results where the first few pages are all auto-generated articles, SEO optimized. The content is gibberish, incomprehensible word salad. But, it is long enough, linked enough, and my keyword and synonyms appear sufficiently enough to show up in my search.
Google Reader dying was a sad day indeed. So was usenet dying was a sad day. So was the town square post board, and before that the town crier.
These are not blocking Goog to achieve their stated mission. It is stating such mission, but not doing anything to achieve it.
Talk is cheap.
How would you stop that?
Or just exclude all basic pages (e.g. recipe) that insist on having a table of contents.
I know that when I'm searching for answers and the page has a TOC, 9/10 I close it out.
Just do some Bayesian filtering, SEO solved. Can't believe those idiots at Google never thought of it.
Do you seriously think spam filtering is this easy? Just one bayesian machine away from solved?
I get the following domains as the top 5 results:
1. allaboutfoo.com
2. fooexperts.com
3. infoonfoo.com
4. foonation.com
5. thefooblog.com
1. A table of contents section
2. About 30mb of AI, autogenerated filler ("Why should you foo?", "How does foo affect your dog?", "Can you foo a foo?", "Why you should foo twice a day?")
3. The same content plagiarized from each other's sites, just slightly reformatted/edited
4. NO ACTUAL INFORMATION ON HOW TO BARBAZ THE FOO
SEO spam is constantly adapting to changes in filtering. If you start filtering sites that have a table of contents, SEO spam will remove their ToC in no time, but authentic blog poster will probably not.
Real content producers don't have the time to chase every change to google's algorithm but SEO spammers do. How do you filter out the spammers who adapt to changes without affecting the real content producers who can't afford it?
I promise you, the problem is harder than you realize. And sure as shit a lot harder than "just add a bayesian filter and these 3 hard coded rules I just came up with"
I used to be really big into SEO. I used to do things all the time by the book. I worked to get really good inbound links, worked to find great directories to link from, and was really into "white hat" SEO.
Fast forward a few years into the late aughts. Had a client who needed a site in less than two months. Some 15 pages of content, design, CMS and a new logo to boot. Was going to pay me a lot if I could do it.
I got it done and was sweating bullets because I had essentially copied all the content on his site from other sites in the same industry. I essentially aggregated all of the big players content into his site. I was petrified the site would get ranked and yanked and I'd spend months trying to get the site back into the SERPS.
Guess what happened?
Within a month, the site was outranking all the bigger companies in his industry. The site was one page 1 of Google in less than 60 days. All the companies he was competing with were at the bottom of page 1 or pushed to page 2. It never dropped lower than #3 on the first page in Google. The site broke nearly every cardinal rule of SEO - duplicate content, keyword stuffing, fake inbound links, etc. and still managed to be on the front page of Google for a host of long tail search terms and has continued to stay on the front page.
It just confirmed Google doesn't care about enforcing any of its rules any more. If I did what I did, I can only imagine what other people are doing to push their site into the top of the rankings.
I would use a search engine like this, but I understand why an existing trillion dollar multinational basically can't do this.
On the other hand, I do a lot of cooking, and recipe sites are forced to have these absurd winding narratives to appease the SEO gods. Nobody likes this and it really ought to be a solvable problem.
Just for the lols, put together a site with content, submit it to Google and see how many clicks you get. Nobody is going to beat a path to your door, even if you are selling 100% pure gold blocks for tuppence a kilo.
I could go on AWS and build a website in minutes from a CMS but in practice, even if you know you can do that, it actually takes a really long time to build and test a website. Even if you are not being held back by dysfuntional teamwork and can just do it all yourself, in your skill level, it will still take a while before that new website is actually working.
Even simple things like email. It probably just works fine out the box. But if you then decide you want a proper mail server, thinking how hard can it be?, then you will go down a rabbit hole. All you want to do is be able to communicate with people but you have to learn a mountain of stuff that you would not need to know if you just went with Squarespace.
Google have also been very bad at semantic elements. If you mark up your docs in divs and spans then that is fine as far as Google is concerned. It is what it looks like, not what it is. You would think they would like documents that use the more meaningful elements such as article, section, aside and so forth, but no.
Because of this we have search engines reverse engineering the structure and content of pages using mystery AI. Nobody is encouraged to do the equivalent of using 'styles' in Word and they are doing the equivalent of using Word as a typewriter, manually bolding headings rather than using a heading style.
We could have an army of highly literate SEO people essentially editing content to make it better for the customer, better organised with sensible HTML elements and with better English (or other language).
But instead we have an army of people who think that repeating words on a page will bump you up the search rankings, which is at the opportunity cost of not writing better content.
WYSIWYG editors are also evil, based on an outdated metaphor. They don't enable you to logically group your content with sections that start with a heading for the screen reader, the section scoping the relevance of the heading.
We all have a love hate relationship with Google, but, if you look at it objectively, they are not really taking the web in the direction Tim Berners Lee had in mind at that content level.
I have found that the few blogs that I do read now are like discovering the old web, but it is something you have to consciously remember to do. Google Reader and RSS really was the magic ticket for making it work, not to mention web rings...
The thing is that there was never any pressure to get RSS working. In a typical agency a decade ago there would be a grand effort to put these social network shares on everything to drive traffic but the people calling the shots on that never really got RSS and never made developers get that working nicely. It was not in the project spec but the silly Facebook/Pinterest/Tweet links had to be done.
Hence the demise is not just on Google, it is with the snake oil cargo cult SEO belief system that has no idea what the Google algorithm is, but they think they can second guess it better than any developer.
If you can't do then teach. If you can't teach then teach Geography. This was once a popular saying. Don't judge.
The modern take: if you can't code then do website design. If you can't do website design then do SEO.
A SEO person has the time to look at various Google dashboards and to make recommendations. For example, your TTFB is a bit high, can we have that lower? The programming team can then say 'what do you think we have been working on for the last six months?'.
Given where we have come, I would like to see a future where everyone hosts their own stuff. By default your home wifi is a server load balancer with sufficient oomph to hold anything you want to share. Out the box you just put in your URL and there you go. No need for AWS or others, your ISP puts your stuff on a CDN with your permissions. A soveriegn web.
The main search engines support schema.org for marking up the "semantic" data associated with a webpage. Typically, this triggers "rich" search results. It goes underused because most commercial web sites don't want to make their semantics so transparent to outsiders, they would rather try to get increased traffic. But this also makes it a potential value-added for more grassroots-based websites that will generally care less about how much casual traffic they get, and more about discoverability for their content.
Consider what happened to "Don't be evil".
> I would like to see Search Engine Optimization ended with extreme prejudice.
> destroying the "information" that they want to make "universally accessible and useful".
> Google Reader dying was a sad day indeed. So was usenet dying was a sad day. So was the town square post board, and before that the town crier.
See also what happened to Rap Genius.
> Talk is cheap.
But so persuasive and effective, something that is best controlled if one is in certain lines of work.
In reality, we're moving to ever simpler UX solutions - TikTok doesn't even require searching for and connecting with friends before you get your dopamin kicks. The next big network will probably be one that's figured out how to continuously serve people personalized content without them having to actively like anything or make active choices (maybe using pupil dilation or whatever).
It is a shame this is how it went. Despite the many ills of social media when I was coming of age, the connecting with friends and sharing random comments was what made it worth the time. It was just another medium of interaction in my friendships. If I went back on to facebook, I'd still find long threads from those formative days.
Now, the human touch is even further buried amid the endlessly funnelled consumption.
I want to be an optimist and say this will strike a peak and we'll go rolling back down the hill to user-centred websites again.
They offer a consistent experience. You’re less likely to be inundated with the random crap found on a random website. People prefer the mediocre, yet consistent, social media “meal” over the fancy meal with possible high degree of variability in quality.
They are a supernormal stimulus. The algorithm feeds you and in many ways hijacks you. There's a reason social networks are dead set against chronological feeds.
They give you this steady drip of "engagement" which often means playing into strong (and negative) emotions.
You don't get that in a true straight content feed. Sometimes content is boring or just not excitable.
For those on the early internet there were things like mailing lists, Usenet, and others which allowed communities to form online.
For those not on the early internet there were still network supporting social interaction and had well developed communities. BBSs, FidoNet, and even consumer oriented online service providers such as CompuServe existed before the internet was widely available to average consumers and pre-dating the existence of websites by some years; such services were absolutely social with email, forums, and real-time group chat rooms. I developed many far flung friendships through many of these social networking services... and all well before 1990.
Youtube also had video replies and threaded discussions before they made it impossible to find your conversation and impossible to figure out who is responding to who.
plus was a hideous pile of trash. A 12 year old could easily design a superior experience. The turd was optimized to gather personal data and didn't have anything else.
Wave and Knol looked interesting but who wants their precious workflow and writings to depend on a company that will inevitably kill it?
What a joke
Don't they want to be the biggest cloud provider by a specific year or something, why would anyone use this company for something as important as cloud infrastructure?
Feel free to look at some of the pages that people have created: https://showcase.mmm.page
Or maybe it was an omen to their own decline.
I would really like personal websites to take off but I’m not quite sure I see a valid reason or incentive for individuals to do so?
Social networks are composed of links (dyads), so an extension to the web makes sense, but search engines, web crawlers, and even 'browsers' break those links as holding value as a dyad. I might know about your website, but I don't hold any special access, or privileged relationship to that site. Anybody browsing through can see the same content and have the same access. With slack and discord, access is limited to those with a specific relationship to the poster. The same is true of newsletters, but in those cases it can be just a consumer relationship, whereas in slack and discord the relationship is bi-directional.
In actuality, the article is arguing for the absence of a social network, a completely open network. That's a fine argument, but it's unlikely that most people want to share every aspect of their lives with the entire world, so the need for closed social networks will continue.
The 'semantic web' or RSS, as the article mentions, which are protocol-like solutions suffer from three things. The first one is that they're slow. Standards for large sets of people are by necessity developed through collaboration, and they cannot compete with the speed of private products. (point also often made by Moxie at Signal)
Secondly, these kinds of internet protocols rely on uniform, machine-readable content. Rich, personalized, app-like experiences are hard to index, Search engines are starting to suffer from this, it's a reason everyone puts "reddit" at the end of the search and tries to get the opinions of people, and why they're not super relevant in China which leapfrogged the 'plain text' internet into private platforms.
Thirdly with protocol based solutions there's no good answer or even incentive to make sure the information is correct or protected, this was one of the major problems of the semantic web. Spammers, attention seekers, fraudsters and so on can game these systems with impunity, siloed company-controlled platforms can fend these bad actors off.
I think each one of these is a deep, structural issue and I haven't really seen a solution to any of these by people who still advocate for returning to individual sites, and I think the trend in what people consume points into the other direction.
I strongly doubt that there was much overlap between reader users and the intended audience for Google+. It's not like your average social media user has ever even heard of RSS yet alone use it for anything. Can you imagine anyone on tiktok using RSS instead? Of course not.
There was in fact an overlap between reader users and the intended audience for Google+, lots of bloggers were invited and joined Google+ when it was invite only.
I can definitely imagine people using RSS feeds for short portrait mode videos, just as people use RSS feeds for podcasts. Just as we have podcast players to consume this kind of RSS feed, we might have tiktok like apps to consume another kind of RSS feed.
I always preferred that way of interacting, since I prefer to see what anyone says about a topic, rather than everything said by some individuals.
As far as I see it, the timing is perfectly ripe right now for change. People are on the lookout for nutritional, good-for-you alternatives to the sugar diet of social media we're being served. It's not everyone, but no longer just tech enabled folks either. Just because we've been going in a bad direction, doesn't mean that's how it will always go.
Maybe I'm being optimistic, but isn't that what's generally needed for positive change?
I for one am very interested in alternatives, and here to support anyone helping to dig us out of where we've found ourselves.
Consider IRC logs. If you didn't have a bot recording conversations and publishing them on a website, you had no records either.
Sure they're currently recorded and siloed, but a bot can be written to record slack/discord etc. and publish on a website just the same.
I only know a few people with a website, but all of them use some social media.
I used to have stats about books I've read and trips I've took. Definitely putting that back. Also will add that feature to my CMS.
Unless you consider HN comments to be the actual content, like many people, me included.
It's unfortunate that the defences, the "hardening" of sites leads to silos, but within these silos the very same forces (attention mining, etc) are leveraged for profit.
Beyond the wall the scavengers will eat you, within the walls you're put to work on a track.
i'm down with OPP