> I'd like to see a project like this which is self-hosted, where the process of buying a domain, acquiring hosting, etc. is made easy for non-technical users. The problem with sites like about.me is that eventually the maintainer gets acquired, gets bored, gets hit by a bus, etc. With a self-hosted site, it works as long as you keep paying Namecheap and AWS, for example. This arrangement also separates the core project owners from responsibility for whatever users slap on their page down the line.
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.