The indie web is dead, long live the indie web (2019)

too much work? use tailscale.

Not if you can afford a cheap VPS to tunnel the traffic through with WireGuard or another solution. Here's my vague blog post on the topic: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/how-to-publicly-access-you...

For example, along the lines of https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ or whatever is the cheapest plan that your provider offers, or something you can find on LowEndBox: https://lowendbox.com/

Though some people also suggested Cloudflare Tunnel or similar solutions, like: https://eddiez.me/working-around-cgnat/

There are two key goals here. First, being in full control of what you can put online and in which form. Second, being able to take whatever you've put online and move ship if you have/want to. Owning a domain name and having access to a VPS or shared hosting are great first steps.

Even so, you're still relying on someone else to host your content for you. Depending on how much stock / trust you are willing to put in someone else's intentions and abilities - present and future - you may want to consider self-hosting on hardware you own. The trade-off being that you'll have to put your confidence in your own abilities, resources and skills. Which isn't a trade-off many people wouldn't necessarily be willing to make.

As for the article. When it comes to the rise of social media over the past 15-20 years, well, Eternal September happened. The vast majority of modern-day influencers aren't interested in tinkering and self-hosting. They just took the opportunity of a platform which offered free - albeit limited - tools to share content with a growing audience. More content and a growing audience, in turn, attracted more people. Arguably, the vast majority of people today would have never really entered into massive online communities if it weren't for big tech, social media, cheap internet connections and cheap mobile devices.

Sure, social media has eclipsed the, comparatively small, web of independent blogs and bloggers such as it was back in the mid-00s. That period of time is never going to come back. Despite all their flaws, vast social media networks aren't going to disappear either. Independent Web publishing may see a modest renaissance today with new protocols, the Fediverse and dirt cheap hosting. Then again, from a sociological perspective: the notion of online identity has always been evolving and has become ever more complex and fluid. People don't exclusively turn to one tool or one platform: they own several identities across many domains, platforms, accounts,... Age, social-economic background, culture, personality traits, peers,... are all deciding factors as to how people manifest that identity. In turn, collectively, this drives how the Web itself keeps evolving and morphing into something new in the future, which may or may not put a bigger focus on self publishing.

If you have a 10 Mbps uplink and an average page size of 1 MB, that’s approximately one visitor per second before it becomes saturated. Ten visitors at once will find the page takes ten seconds to load instead of one. A hundred, a hundred, though by then many will give up and you may want more deliberate load management or shedding (either limiting the number of connections you’re willing to open at a time and delaying accepting new connections, or returning a brief response that says “sorry, too much load right now, try again a bit later”, or dropping some connections outright).

But if you have a 100 Mbps uplink and serve simple content with no images, you might have an average page size of 20 KB, and then you could handle over 500 page loads per second, which is almost certainly several orders of magnitude more than you get (that’s a billion page loads per month). But at 500 per second, that means you can only spend 2ms of processing power (all cores, so with perfect parallelism the single-core CPU time available will be 2ms times the number of cores you have) per page served before processing power becomes the bottleneck.

The main problem is harassment, spam, maintenance & op cost and DDoS

I was suggesting a change in social norms not technical.

There’s no reason I need all the engineering of Facebook to directly share with a few friends and family. And having seen one social site after another fill up with more noise than signal, there’s little value in engineering sorting algorithms that attempt to preserve context rummaging through it all looking for needles in haystacks (ML).

Feynman suggested modeling things literally is an inefficient path to discovery. Physicists achieved their best results dispensing with imagining the world as literal pulleys and levers and weights. We don’t need to literally model how to sort it all, just the right amount to assist others.

Software engineers need to pivot from sorting stupid meme posts and put those brains on truly interesting ideas: https://youtu.be/ZSddchIGNG0

Disclaimer: For what its worth, I do not personally know Snarfed (Bridgy's main author), but i have followed him for years, and as stated above, have used his code in the past to great success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_page

Or maybe they meant webrings?

This made them a very easy way to find new sites and communities, especially in fandoms like the ones for the Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, etc.

You can see a working example in the right column of this longtime Pokemon site:

https://www.dragonflycave.com/

With all those tiny buttons and what not.