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Comment by gumboza | Hacker News Reader

This.

I'm not sure why the hell anyone would do anything else to be honest. It has been an insane proposition putting content on something you don't control.

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I agree in principle, but for people who just want to focus on their project, it’s a heavy tax to learn how domains and content and everything work.

Medium’s promise is “you focus on writing, we’ll deal with distributing.” They don’t live up to that promise in lots of ways, but it’s hard to fault someone for not wanting to deal with the tech.

Is learning how to navigate the DMV system in any US state less "heavy"? I think Medium and others contribute to the problem by perpetuating the myth that ordinary folks can't do it/ it's just too hard. How we break through that is something to think about.

Yes, if you just show up to the DMV they will tell you what you need to do. You only need to self-actualize and figure things out ahead of time to get things done faster than multiple iterations of going there and waiting in line. Remember, the DMV has to deal with the below average members of the public.

For the topic's problem, I'd love to see some automated setup app that would take a "VPS host account", and do all of the installation/configuration to support service(s) running Free software to accomplish a high level task (eg a blog). Like a graphical NixOps with precanned configurations.

You'd need to initially cut down the number of options (say VPS account must be at one of 2 hosts, domain must be at one of 2 registrars), but I think the main problem would be trying to straddle so many abstraction levels.

So I’m a writer with a deep passion for tropical fruits, and I want to start a blog. How do I find your setup app, or even know that I need it?

Yes, I agree that discovery and creating a self-perpetuating critical mass is the hardest aspect of this. Heck, I'm sure some incarnation of this app already exists, but technical people don't need it (so it's not popular here), and non-technical people don't know that they need it. Meanwhile Medium seemingly advertises their own offering on each of their customers blogs.

How to overcome this? Maybe it would be enough to be in some mobile app stores with a distinctive memorable name (despite the horrible UX on mobile), and have a slowly accreting fanbase. Then every time these issues flare up someone would say 'Install LibreZooks to run your blog" in addition to all of those "just use DO and Docker" comments. People do seem to be moving to Mastodon slowly with the current happenings, but decentralized-first stuff can never match the advertising saturation of well funded surveillance companies.

There's also the difficulty that many people these days aren't publishing just to publish, but they're publishing as a side hustle or hoping to get rich. So middlemen like Medium that promise to extract as much as possible and then share a cut have another leg up over "default options" like running Google ads or whatever.

DMV is maybe not the best analogy since it’s more or less mandatory and people can’t choose to invest more time/money to do it better.

How about car repair? As a car enthusiast, I think anyone who fails to invest time and energy to really understand how cars work, from cv joints to TPMS systems, is putting themselves at the mercy of repair shops that can be capricious.

And financial planning, and yard care, and zoning policy, and. . .

Point being, life is too complex for everyone to be an expert in everything they depend on. And we all depend on things where we’re not even expert enough to know the implicit assumptions and dependencies we’re taking on.

I don’t think we can break through that. I’d love to be wrong, but I just don’t see a way for people to have deep understanding of every tool they use while still doing the stuff they want to do.

It is hard to self-host properly. Getting started can be easy with a good tutorial but securing your software and server can be difficult, and even the pros often fail. We're still all suffering the effects of unmaintained, insecure Wordpress installs over the years.

Well there's an entry cost or an exit cost or a risk. If the tradeoff makes sense then spot on but if Medium pulls your stuff you have an untenable risk tradeoff.

This is why I don't write articles. The investment vs return is low based on the exit costs, risks and benefits.

Seems an odd choice for a developer, for sure. I'm with all those who also have pointed out that self-hosting is the better route. Heck, as mentioned here, a compromise for this particular user would be to host the code on github and then use github pages for a nice companion site.

I typically go the github pages route. I used to buy domains for every project I spun up, but the collective bill started to add up for a bunch of very low traffic sites for projects that didn’t pan out. Now I just use github.io.

The other concern is legacy. I’m getting up there in age. I would like some of my work to continue to be useful after I retire without me paying for domain renewals or worrying about hosting. Without my intervention a github.io site will probably outlast a onionisafruit.com site.

> but the collective bill started to add up for a bunch of very low traffic sites for projects that didn’t pan out.

Then maybe group them on a domain with subdomains or just subpages?

IDK, clicking reply and typing into a box sure seems easier than spinning up a domain for this comment.

> This.

You're not on Reddit, pal.

“This” is fine as long as it isn’t the only content of the comment. It is simply a signal that the following text isn’t meant to contradict what they are replying to. It’s a simple shorthand for “I wholeheartedly agree, and furthermore …”

I find it irritating, but I can see your point.

As the poster who posted it, it irritates me but it saves a lot of typing and is a well understood idiom.

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