Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

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Hosting is the easy problem. The main problem is the discoverability on the users end. Individual websites just don't show up on Google anymore, worse yet, even if you find one you like, your browser provides no tools to keep track of it. Bookmarks are completely static, they don't inform you when a site changes. While RSS exists, it fails to integrate with the Web, it's basically its own separate thing, requiring separate sites and clients. It no longer has any browser integration either.

People might not like social media, but the ability to discover content on there and keep track of it is just lightyears ahead of the regular old Web.

Another big problem is the permanence of the content. Hosting your own content today is easy. Ensuring that it is still online 20 years from now is hard. Worse yet, even if you maintain your site, URLs still change over time, links break. An IndieWeb build with regular Web tools is just going to be a lot of 404 and "DNS address could not be found".

We've been there, done that. It doesn't work. There is no point in trying to repeat it without some key innovation.

> The main problem is the discoverability on the users end

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

Those are operational problems, he's talking about customer pain points,ie even with all those things list you still need to get people to the door for it to happen

If your "social" site gets some attraction, you will get DDoS'd by some evil actor, sooner or later.

100%, apologies I don't mean to downplay those issues, more helping comms between two parties.

Those are legit operational issue to deal with but he was speaking more to product pain points, things that will motivate a customer.

Most of these go away if you remove social features.

Maintenance is not a problem. Most of the supposed maintenance burden of self-hosting a website is FUD from cloud-provider marketing.

Like I spend probably like 60 minutes a month on maintenance, and I operate a dang search engine on my server. Sure I'm not getting five nines, but who cares. (There is additional operational work, but that's orthogonal to how and where its hosted)

> Most of the supposed maintenance burden of self-hosting a website

Ever tried to host and then years later upgrade an indie wordpress site? It's painful for semi-technical people.

I was building packet schlepping hardware for Nortel from 99-02; I know “how the internet works”.

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

From what you're saying it sounds like what we need is a search engine for indie sites. There's already one for old-school sites but this would work better as a directory type of deal (or webring) of old times where the sites would still be crawled and indexed so the content is fresh. One of your requirements was never a requirement for the big web either. Namely that sites are up 20 years later. I don't think that's necessarily a problem.

Sounds like you may be interested in https://ooh.directory/

Note that ooh.directory only indexes blogs (that have RSS feeds). Personal/indie sites that have other structures are prohibited.

Which is fine, but means it isn't a one-stop-shop for indie sites.

It's close enough. Ideally the RSS-friendly sites it links to will post their own links to non-RSS pages of interest.

https://wiby.me/ returns hits that "feel" like the old web, mostly plain HTML.

I think said sites need to be submitted first, no? In any case - as a fan of the ol' web - i favor this type of search engine! :-)

That's the one I referred to as the old-school website one.

Something like https://search.marginalia.nu?

The main engine for discoverability for small Indy sites is google, and google lost the fight against seo spam sometime in the last 5 years. Independent sites are hard to find now, so you have to promote them via the closed networks (at least, the ones that allow you to link outside themselves — many do not, or they restrict it)

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