Every person on the planet should have their own website
eftegarie.com
eftegarie.com
Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety.
> Everyone should be writing in public.
I never understood why this kind of injonctions for us to do things keep on coming up to the front page of HN. I understand that they make good titles, though.
> “Hey, I have a crazy story. I found this website today. There used to be this person who did this and that. And he’s our grand-grand-grand-father!”
I vaguely know that my grand-grand-grand-father was a farrier in one of the Napoleons' army and was a kind man, my children will vaguely know it as well. We'll all die and be forgotten, I think that's OK.
There is also no guarantee that archive.org will survive a couple decades. But a notebook in the attic definitely will.
Ok, "every person on the planet should have access to basic hygiene and food safety, their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want."
Unless you move and lose it... or there is a house fire... or someone finds it and burns it... etc.
A notebook in the attic is probably the least persistent medium you could choose. Fire? Gone. Water? Gone. 20 years of heat. Probably unreadable.
Even the seemingly simple thought experiment of “deliver a one sentence message to a person living at your current address 500 years from now” is nearly impossible using ordinary means available to an individual.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptorium
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
Always have backup.
We aren't immortal, so it won't be in your control forever regardless of how you record it. Over long periods of time, the internet is far more accessible for long term storage of someone's writings than physical media. An unsheltered person with a library card could write about themselves and that would be preserved on archive.org, copied by other/future archival websites, copied by individual data hoarding enthusiasts, etc. There is almost zero chance a notebook would survive any significant period of their life, let alone after their death.
Maybe for people with stable families and enough disposable income to easily store boxes of printed material for generations, physical media is a good choice. But not everyone has progeny to pass things on to. Not everyone has the ability to safely and securely store generations of writings. A house fire in your lifetime may be unlikely, but what about in 3 generations worth of houses? And there is zero redundancy. If archive.org shut down tomorrow, there are people on reddit’s r/datahoarder that have copies of various portions of it. Data would be gone, but not all of it. If a tornado hits your house tomorrow, there is no one that has copies of your handwritten notebooks. 100% loss.
Agree, whole thing comes across as notionally adjacent to shit like "effective altruism" and disguising a greedy disregard for material reality as equitabiity
And the original commenter is wrong, 91% of people do have access to basic hygiene (i.e. hand washing facilities), according to https://ourworldindata.org/hygiene
And only 28% of people suffer from moderate to severe food insecurity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-...
So really most people have the basics covered.
> I feel the need to remind you that the Effective Altruism community is also moving billions of dollars to substantially help the extreme poor.
The Dutch government alone spends $5B per year on aid to the poorest country, and The Netherlands is a small country. Effective Altruism is just a guise to get political influence through capital.
Of course people who already think they are god's divine gift to the world will think they would be the best to give out or pick the recipient of billions in charity over a more democratic system.
But wasn't that in direct response to the claim that most people did not have that access? It feels like either a misunderstanding or mischaracterization of what they were saying.
"Most"?
I am hopeful that the author did not mean for this idea to apply retroactively.
> There is also no guarantee that archive.org will survive a couple decades. But a notebook in the attic definitely will.
Houses burn down all the time. Pointing out that everybody has access to a theoretically fireproof house is a bit funny for a thought that began with an admonishment about hygiene and food safety.
While I do get your follow-up criticism, I took the notebook comment to mean that if I stop paying my “notebook bill”, or a massive solar flare strikes my house, the notebook in my attic doesn’t vanish from existence.
Internet is a _lot_ easier to provide than basic hygiene and food safety. Look at most of India.
Not to be pedantic, but since another comment questioned that, the numbers for 2020:
> 3.6 billion people lacked safely managed services, including 1.9 billion people with basic services, 580 million with limited services, 616 million using unimproved facilities, and 494 million practising open defecation.
Source: https://washdata.org/sites/default/files/2021-07/jmp-2021-wa...
To be clear: I don't care whether this is technically "most people", it is far too many people lacking decent sanitation. (edit: fix wrong negation in last sentence).
- safely managed water is 1) clean, 2) immediately available water 3) in the household
- basic is if one of those above three criteria are missing but water can be accessible w/ a <30 minute round trip
- unimproved is people drinking surface water from lakes, ditches, etc.
I've had a website since I was in my early teens and throughout most of my career as a programmer, 20+ years.
In 2018 I became homeless in SF and still had some websites for the first couple years where I started posting stuff about being homeless. When I lack basics like hygiene and safe food is when I've felt having a website would do the most good.
I've been pretty vocal about being homeless and it's taken over my social media channels, but you can bet the content isn't surfaced much or to people who I knew in real life who might've cared or helped me out if they knew sooner. If my RSS feed wasn't dead, who knows?
Even $5/mo or $10 for a domain renewal is too much most months, lacking said and similar resources. I've not had phone service in a year, phone in need of repair and now lost to forced migration due to domestic violence. I'm aware of Obama phone but I'm also aware of spyware, data privacy and similar and have done the math--no thanks.
Not a happy story at all (I feel joy and peaceful, personally). Makes most people feel super bad. Not feeling like a victim either... I totally understand why mainstream sites don't surface real content that I post. I still post it, but having my own website with a feed or forum now of all times would be superior. Especially when I have to hold my tongue about various topics that fall too far outside of community guidelines / algorithmic fairness and could get my account suspended.
Long winded I know, just underlining that people without basic hygiene or safe food may be perfectly capable of running a web site and even custom apps with novel features, and may need to have a voice more than anyone or ever. There are mainstream options but most here can probably get behind the idea of running one's own services and owning the registration.
A solution I've had in mind is libraries running decades-long hosting services attached to member cards. Various people have expressed a little interest but I've not been persistent in following up or pushing anything forward myself. Lack of stability makes me come off as really flaky and poor at communication online and more--and look like an excuse maker for expressing such things.
Well, its not quiet a library but definitively running since decades: sdf.org
It's also worth noting we're in a global food crisis which started in 2020 and got worse in 2021. It continues to grow year over year. Ukraine and Russia were also the two biggest cereal providers, which apparently has affected these numbers significantly. That's just food safety though, for nutrition the numbers are worse.
https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-h...
Do I have an incorrect understanding of the word "most"?
Regardless how does 3.6:7.8 ie 46% constitute a majority? Most is a word. Words have meaning.
Respectfully, what you said would be less wrong if you had used the word many.
Also keep in mind that these numbers are based on estimations and definitions that give some room for interpretations, so they cannot be 100% accurate either.
Almost everything can be deemed as not worth doing because we need to fix sanitation first.
The author of the post is probably implicitly trying to say ‘everyone [who can] should’.
The person who posted about sanitation and taking “everyone” to mean literally everyone in the world, is being overly pedantic in my opinion.
Graciously, they are off by a few percent. Parsing words does not diminish the magnitude. The issue still stands. A large enough portion of the worlds problems dwarf the initiative to give everyone a webpage/domain. It's silly enough to discount.
From half. “Most” is likely close to 65-70%. And 46% is “less than half”.
If more than or equal to 46% qualifies as most, then both the statements would be correct:
(1) Most people don’t have access to sanitation.
(2) Most people do have access to sanitation.
That wouldn’t make logical sense.
Hyperbole for the sake of making an argument does not mean the writer is unable to construe of or consider situations where what they wish for is impractical or far down peoples priority list.
> I never understood why this kind of injonctions for us to do things keep on coming up to the front page of HN. I understand that they make good titles, though.
Because they set out ideas about society that may or may not be something we agree with, but that makes for interesting discussion.
> But a notebook in the attic definitely will.
Most of my dads notes have survived, but certainly not all. One of my grandparents diaries have survived. To my knowledge no writing by the other tree has survived; if it has it has already diffused among siblings two out of three which are dead, with no clear knowledge where any documents might have ended up.
None of my great grandparents or great great grandparents writing survives other than a couple of words written on the handful of photographs and two drawings which have survived, even though I know for a fact that some of them wrote regular letters to family after emigrating the the US.
The written records we have even from a time when people used to write a lot on paper are only a tiny fraction of the records made.
Some families will be lucky and have a lot, some will have nearly nothing, and often when you have a lot it quickly difuses out among descendants to the point that soon many will not have more than small fractions of even what is available about their ancestors, if any. E.g. I only got hold of one of the handful of surviving pictures of one of my great grandfathers because I stumbled on my grandmothers half brothers daughter doing genealogy and found her daughters on Facebook, and she happened to have one picture.
I do agree there's no guarantee about archive.org, and so I'm certainly ambivalent about people putting all their eggs in that basket, but this admonition for all of us to have a website will never reach anyone to start with, and nothing prevents both and/or at least keeping local copies of the site as well.
- knowing this about you ancestor is interesting but thinking they are the inspiration for the "for want of a nail" cautionary tale is what most people are expecting when they start looking into the past. The reality is most people's lives are pretty mundane and they personal connections are what make it interesting.
- notebook in the attic - there's a movement to digitize all the notebooks in attics we are losing over time. This is especially a thing in agriculture because of all the information about local weather, crop yields, etc. It would be great if there was some publicily funded service that you could send these to for free instead of throwing them out (possibly with drop off at public libraries that could either digitize them or send them in bulk). They could scan and return for a fee.
It is exaggerated, but many cautions are. Some things you post on the internet will likely disappear, but many won't, and the key factor is after you've posted it, you quickly lose control over its ultimate fate.
Once you share something online, there's a big chance someone is keeping a copy, it might not be accessible on the internet anymore, but it's never lost
Some of the best conversations on the early Net were closed communities where users had a safe zone. Things like The Well and Screen Porch/Caucus "virtual communities" were mostly "conversations", but lots of just informative posts.
The author makes interesting points, and "everyone" makes more sense when you scope it to the HN crowd.
Still no. So you are saying that everyone who reads HN should have a website?
So I'm building Timelinize: https://twitter.com/timelinize -- the idea is that everyone can get their data out of the cloud and off their devices and into a single, unified timeline on their own computer. And their timeline is just one shard of a global universal timeline, and timelines can be meshed together seamlessly.
Still much work to do but my family is hopefully going to start using this in the next few years! And maybe yours too :)
The reality is, the quickest way for me to get updates out to wide swath of people (at the time) was to set up a Twitter. Things have changed a lot since then... ironically validating the need for something like Timelinize, I guess.
Doesn’t this counter the entire argument?
https://www.npostart.nl/drugslab-afl-5-bastiaan-snuift-ketam...
And psychedelics are fun (in moderation). Try some, they might expand your mind a little.
"Every person on the planet should have their own website" probably qualifies if the beholder's eye is over the age of 20.
So, I am working on an e-book reader myself and I love e-books as well. But the problem with e-books is not that they don't have "smell or feel" but rather DRM issues. Unless you get all your books in a DRM-free e-pub format, they can be taken out of your library at any time for any reason. Also its nice to have something to pass down from generation to generation.
I am personally an avid supporter of both digital and physical books, but to say that physical books are an "inferior" choice is incorrect because people choose those for entirely different reasons than they might choose a digital copy.
Most of the time it is actually easier to find a copy of a DRM free book on Anna's Archive than it is to find a DRM copy...
This is more an argument against DRM than it is against ebooks.
My complaints about DRM aside, my biggest problem with OPs article on e-books is thinking that one is "superior" to another, when different people get different formats for different reasons. Some may like the idea of being able to carry tons of books around with them on a tablet, or being able to search text. Others might dislike these features, and prefer physically turning pages. Neither is "better" than the other, and I dislike people that DO think one or the other is inherently superior for whatever reasons.
The argument seems to be "leave a record".
And secondarily, "for your descendants" (they write "ancestors", but that's obviously wrong).
You can do the second part without sharing with the world that it was yours. Ensure someone in your family knows, or leave notes in safe locations.
I guess we can infer a third assumption: that there's a reasonably high chance that archive.org will outlive your personal papers or data, making it potentially a valuable alternative to a journal on paper or your own systems. That part is an interesting discussion. I'd worry if everyone opted for relying on archive.org over their own copies, but at the same time, I know how vulnerable personal records can be.
Or his descendants might find a reference to it or figure out it was him ?
if you have a garden, even a small one, its so rewarding and interesting, and it develops attention
My modern phone is useful. It has replaced so many things: I no longer carry a paper notebook, for example. I no longer spend money on watches. I have a map with me. If I get in a bind, I can get help - I have some security because of the phone. I have a translator app in my phone! As imperfect as it is, it is better than all of the tools before it. I can pay for stuff with it if I'd like to - and I do, every time I ride the bus. I don't need to print out airplane tickets any more and a slew of other useful things.
I wish everyone had a telephone, as the world would improve a bit. I don't really understand why you think it is a dumb idea.
How about i sit in my garden instead, smoking a pipe, and not give a ** about whether others know and see me.
The fun begins when you realize they meant everyone host their blogs themselves . . . on their phones. There was a server project (called Raccoon iirc) and you could extend it with python scripts all on top of Symbian. It was beautifully mad but surprisingly educational. (I added GPS support and some usage of Bluetooth beacons when inside which had to be made up as there wasn’t a known standard at the time).
It’s worth considering why exactly such an idea strikes us as so completely mad now.
As one such esoteric thought: the "more attractive" a person was, the more frequent they would have to re-charge their cell phone (since it was acting as server). Some of the most-popular eTHOTs' phones would probably drain in just minutes (male or female, but particularly the latter).
Because a web server that doesn't work when you're in a tunnel or on a flight or out of battery is one of the worst possible choices for a web server? And the additional drain on your battery. So "completely mad" still seems to fit. ;)
poo.
But 30 years later, I think there are many reasons why you would not want to do this. (I also stopped doing so after 15.000 posts or so).
– you will grow and you will change opinions about things often 100 percent, the internet memory is however forever – you will enter in different careers and depending on the customer you would not want to be completely frank about every little thing you think or what your preferences are or what your experience is – in real life there are larger groups of persons with very different and often extreme viewpoints on either religious related, political related, culturally related etc viewpoints. This has grown and grown and has become a real life danger if you get picked up by some internet thread on some social media forum. This has changed from the 90’s where the internet was filled with intelligence and a hopeful view on the world. It is easy to fall into the trap of engaging in various discussions – you get children and often different social circles where you want to engage into blanco your children might not like at a certain stage you posting stuff (or pictures) (or opinions) – there are tons of frauds and criminal networks who gladly scrape everything you are from there not in the least for phishing
So more or less: because there is also the real world with the 20% of people who are on the fraud/extreme religious/extreme political/other criminals/dumb side and there is real life social interaction and personal growth the following 30 years where once you write something it becomes stone
No problem I thought, I'll just delete my account. They did not have a delete account function. So I overwrite everything I had written, replacing it with random characters (would not allow me to just put nothing when there was something already there either).
Lesson learned!
As I noted elsewhere, the argument in the article basically boils down to leaving a record, and specifically leaving a record for your descendants, and then argues that archive.org will be reliable enough to ensure those records survives. By arguing for leaving it for your descendants it does argue for there being some way for your descendants to identify your writings, but that does not require them to be publicly linked to your name.
You can do both. Most of my writing is easily linked to my name either directly from usernames or profile links, or because I've left enough bread crumbs in things I've posted (HN is the trifecta; it's in my profile, my username isn't unique but the link is easy to guess, and I've given plenty of breadcrumbs). I take care about this, and think about it, because as far as I know my name is globally unique, and so I don't even have any hope of disappearing among others with my name in search engines etc.
Some of it would be embarrassing if some people dug it up in the "wrong" contexts today, but I have a good idea about the "worst bits" and none of it are things I am not willing to stand behind today even if I've changed my mind about them or now think they were dumb.
But not all my writing is possible to link to me at all, at least as far as I know. And that is also a conscious choice for some of the kind of reasons you gave.
Some I may not care to tell anyone about at all. Some there are plenty of notes about in my papers and digital records so it'll be easy for my descendants to find if they care.
I want to have processes to review what I wrote, and review how strongly I felt about it at the time, and update my stances.
Personally I think the danger is far over-rated. We see the spectacular & loud exceptions to hundreds of millions of people actively posting & sharing & having fine undisturbed lives. Not everyone is going to have 15 minutes of being under attack in their life, but there's kind of a tacit assumption that having been online is all too likely to explode upon one's face at some point. And indeed, we do need to respect this possibility, make it a known idea, but this fear I think has way too much representation, & the opposing view, that it's very unlikely to ever be an issue I think is way undertold & undershared. As usual, subtle, nuance & complex gets sand-blasted away by something emotional & heart plucking & attention-grabbing.
And in the aftermath, we have humanity being silent. Humanity loses a shared heritidge it could have, for understanding itself better. Because it was, in my humble opinion, unreasonably afraid someone might attack their words. Personally, I strongly feel that values of onlineness & openness & democracy each should make us push back a lot harder.
It can be a psuedo-nym, that's fine, but not sharing yourself seems like a waste of a life. And I think it misses opportunity to refine yourself, to ask yourself what your views are. Writing creates thought, writing creates perspective, and doing at least a good bit of it openly to the world - even if no one today is reading - is so valuable.
It curses an unaware person to feel shame or guilt if they choose not to do the prescription.
Not censored profile pages run by the latest social network that becomes obsolete in the next decade.
Me, hammering a buzzer as quickly as I can: "What is a phishing attacker's most deeply erotic wet dream?"
GPT prompt: "As a phishing attacker, find me websites where users have written about their school, their mother's maiden name, and where they currently work."
GPT has access to Bing, and it's a really nice interface to unstructured data...
No, I don't think, everyone should have a domain. The Internet has become a minefield of entities and people who cannot stand to have good things, lot more than people who are good by default.
Domains comes with a lot of responsibility to maintain it the right way. It is like maintaining a pet -- you need to tend to it to have it the way you want. Forget domains, most of the population do no have a clue how their emails are supposed to be and in fact, quite a lot of people think "gmail" is what email is.
Seems a bit of a too narrow perspective. Many people just don’t have time and money to have their own website. Just because some thirteen-year-old has it doesn’t mean everyone should.
Also, slightly contradictory that everyone should write in public but the person suggesting it does not show their website.
So I suggest a slightly different title (and corresponding content):
Every person on the planet should be able to have their own website
[1] for example https://jointakahe.org/
Edit: I'm mistaken, because it's all just ActivityPub on the fediverse, of course there are projects making stuff lighter. I haven't found a dedicated single user project that's more than a demo, but stuff like Plemora seems light enough
They could be OCRed I guess. But why? Except for 'notable' people, I've never run into a library where such things are accessible. How much of my family would share my old interests? Being 'immortalized on the web' seems ... a bit vain.
I've often wished for a way to learn far more human details about great-grandparents (and earlier). Not just the "born, married, died" record. If they'd wanted it, for the self-selected few.
So I imagine solarized tombstones. They could electronically play-back (and/or downloading) files (audio/video/text) I thought worth sharing. Frozen in crystals. For centuries. Like that 'library' in the 2002 remake of 'Time Machine'.
What would be needed is either some kind of sensible hierarchy, or solve the problem like we did it with phones and just skip the name part completely and allocate a number to everyone instead. The discovery of everyones "internet number" could be delegated to social networking, both the old fashioned way (printed business cards) and more modern way ("facebook").
Interesting question is could we allocate IPv6 block to everyone and have it be somehow part of the solution. Maybe not directly, but it would be still something to ponder.
However, the identity of the page, publishing under your own name is the thing that this post doesn't really cover. They mention not linking to their own old site as it has stuff that they did when they were a child. They really should have expanded on that.
Archive.org is both an incredible resource but also a risk to people publishing things that they later regret. We have a right to change our mind, grow up and become a different person. Under GDPR there is the "right to be forgotten", we are early in the societal development of such rights in relation to the internet, and they can be abused by people removing thing the public should have a right to know. However I believe this is an important right, and because of it I believe the right to publish online under a pseudonym is important.
So yes, almost everyone should have an online presence, and most do. But we should also have a right for it to disappear in time.
I write online for myself now and the communities I contribute to, not for my children or their theoretical children. Certainly not some random slooth in future.
That being said, I like the idea of just using your phone. I scroll through Twitter, HN, Reddit, etc. a good chunk of the day anyways, might as well spend that time reading something worthwhile instead.
I also want to point out that I really like the look and feel of this website. I adore minimalist design for blogs, and my own website is similarly minimal but not quite the same. The author also touches on some subjects I find particularly interesting; investing, drugs, school (or lack thereof), etc.
I own myname.com and mylastname.com but so far it's been a complete waste of money and not at all helpful. Don't have anything to do with them.
Our ability to tell what is garbage & what has use seems incredibly poor. We just don't know. Who how & when do we take your mercenary plan into action to decide when to wipe things out?
And we may glean great insight & wisdom from the aggregate, from being able to view historical sentiment. Efforts like the Google N-grams project can show incredible trends & patterns happening across time, and is just an incredibly simple first-level example of analysis.
I tried blogging (as opposed to journaling) and then had the foresight to realize that 90% of what I wrote is either not interesting to others, not up to my own standards of quality, or could actively open me up to attack by Internet crazies (by revealing information about where I live, for example).
My early livejournal experiences were pretty whatever, but even at that age I think I was getting a lot better each quarter, each year.
Like much in life, focusing on specific outcomes often occludes the value of enjoying & focusing on the process. Your concerns about not meeting your own standards or not being interesting enough are, I think, representative of many fears & burdens of perfectionism many people carry; a natural dislike for not being as grand & great as we feel we are worthy of. Being raw & vulernable & what we are, and working & honing that: that's the exercise of becoming a mature, well lived adult. I love those who can find the courage to let that process unfold in public.
It's called Facebook/Instagram.
What happens to these accounts then?
Do we see great great great grandma, but all her posts are closed & locked to time?
Maybe account inheritance is the way. You designate one person to take over your account. People become maintainers of the family tree, are the designated owner. You want to see the family tree? Talk to your cousin four times removed, he has the access keys to ~80 of your ancestors. And that other nephew has another ~40. Oh and your aunt has ~20.
Why? So randos on the Internet can make a snap judgement as to what kind of person I am?
This seems like an intermediate step between no knowledge and a machine-readable personality profile.
I enjoy reading blogs and visiting their websites but it’s not for everyone. You’re going to need to try harder to know people.
And it leaves the door open to the future; think of how hard scholars today go to find words from antiquity, what effort they take to understand the past: isn't it a noble idea to equip the past with a better view, to be able to see broadly into what the world is today?
The world is so tired & frustrated & angsted up, over so many situations. The comments here almost universally come in extremely hot. They are short on possibility, actively disbelieve in what we have. I confess it's indeed reasonable to have some curmudgeonliness, to assume people are useless & uninteresting. But isn't an effort like this what would make the world better? If we thought laterally, if we both recognized that we have but one small voice but also cherished that light? To me, what's proposed here is the most basic inner-core of social contract: the recognition of human value, human dignity.
These comments are amok with only the downsides of today. They are afraid of the couple scattering of examples of the weird that emerges at scale, the people harassed or bugged in real life. But there's so many hundreds of millions of people who are posting & sharing & blogging just fine. These comments disdain people & their discard their worth, without pausing to reflect on what gems in the rough might emerge. No one takes a long view, and asks how humanity might be different if we thought long, if we made a long context part of our existence. These attitudes engender the short term mercenary small view of exstence, they promote the havoc & irrelevance that they themselves disdain.
There's so many interesting fractal possibilities & growths we could make towards this kind of idea. The costs have never been lower to keep & preserve. The prompt, of writing for the long, for the world: that calling I think would change us, would help us beget something closer to a smart & sensible noosphere, that can care, that escapes the traps of negativity & turmoil-driven attention hounding, that would help us break free of so many of the unlikable conditions. I hope we can believe in each other, I hope we don't forever stay so pissy & snarky & short, I hope we can believe in trying for good things, moral & right things, even though there are challenges, even though it won't be perfect, even though less worthy & ideal words might also be captured in the archive.
I vote with this guy: let's keep the lightcone.
I always thought that was the thing of social media. Lower barrier to entry so anyone can publish anything. From LiveJournal to Myspace to Youtube to Snap/Insta/Tiktok.
I'd love to see some more resilient options for hosting services past-death. Filling up a Hetzner account with $20k and letting it ride seems like a ridiculous plan but maybe that's the general idea. You'll also need some way to keep the DNS alive, which is a second major challenge. And your Let's Encrypt better keep working too, since so many web capabilities required HTTPS.
Hopefully there's no CVEs that cause your online systems to be overrun by bots & get taken down. Back in the 90's everyone was all freaked out that "oh no, computer systems would keep changing so much over time, how will we ever be able to use old systems?" but today it feels like running an ancient apache httpd or ancient nginx would actually kind of be ok, if it weren't exploited.
For a lot of people, just having a static http site they can zip up is probably a great option, if preservability across the ages is the goal. I do wish we had more planning & options for long-term hosting. Over time, it seems likely that interest in this will tick up. I'd love to see a Kuberentes co-op dedicated to ultra-affordable long-term hosting; it seems plausible that this kind of base infrastructure could port forward indefinitely, and having things like a thicker L7 gateway offers some significant security advantages versus containers or services being open to any traffic.
Everyone who wants one should have their own, sure, but saying everyone should have one just because is silly.
TBH though evangelicals should be pushing hard for it, theoretically they won't even be around for the fallout.
There's nothing that says everything has to be open to everyone. With capability based tokens, you could give access to select portions to friends, family, co-workers, etc. If you want to put all of your mp3s up for your own use, or to share with friends, but not accessible to others, why not?
We should all have a voice in this new medium. Let's not shun this idea because the details aren't perfect. Our need to pick apart things helps us avoid future trouble when we're coding... but it's not always the most constructive response. That's the first problem I see with this post... our (HN et al) reaction to it.
The other problem I see is technical, but also related to our views of the world... and that's security. Given our current views on operating systems, especially our support of systems with ambient authority, it is unwise to make a habit of just visiting any random website. This is why walled gardens are so popular. It's a technical issue that is widely seen to be a problem with either capitalism and markets, or some malign quirk of human nature, but the root cause is technical.
Related Tangent about OS design: Imagine if there were no fuses or circuit breakers, and nobody had heard of them.... would you be willing to just randomly plug in a device from an unknown manufacturer? You could potentially burn your house down, and have everyone in your grid mad at you (because they no longer have power) as a result. You'd never do anything imaginative in that world with electricity. This is how I see our world with the internet and our crop of OSs that have ambient authority everywhere.
Not everyone wants to write.
Let people do their thing, and you do yours.
most of the web is unreachable. sigh....
That's where I'd start, anyway.
Yeah, can't see how that could possibly go wrong or be misused or anything.
The part about lying is simply pointing out that most pages will be not even particularly interesting (e.g. see Xing profiles). Not sure what you understood it to mean.
Hm.
> I’ve had my own website since I was 13. I will not tell you the domain name
So what's the point.
> Hey, I have a crazy story. I found this website today. There used to be this person who did this and that. And he’s our grand-grand-grand-father
Imagine your class mates would discover, that your grand-grand-grand father owned slaves and they had pictures...
Why would I worry about people knowing what my great great grandfather did?
It isn't fair, but no one can really escape their family history.
And while mature folks understand that their ancestors were probably horrible people, sometimes by both today's and yesterday's standards - it isn't something that always shows in actions.
If your ancestors were slave owners, that information is there. If there is a picture, that will be there too. You would be astounded the sorts of detailed records that people have found and digitized.
Pretty much if you were an affluent family that could afford one, you owned at least one slave.
Notably, Mitch McConnell's, Obama's, and Biden's ancestors are all confirmed to have owned slaves. Not surprising as they all come from affluent families.
It becomes significantly harder to talk liberal/libertarian shit if everybody knows you're a descendant of slaveholders speaking to an audience of descendants of slaveholders, ridiculing the descendants of slaves.
Suggestions how to be objective about subjective topics?
There are any number of reasons why this is a terrible thought.
Boomers and Gen Xers were brought up in a world without the Internet and we all survived just fine.
Being told by someone who does something that we should all do the same thing, is a sign of emotional insecurity and narcissism.
Free choice is great. I used to have a blog, however I no longer had time for it. Which is also totally fine.
The older I get, the less I desire for my “public” me to do anything with Social media, leaving my various aliases (all different) to have that minimal outlet.
(just like Hacker News where the comments posted must align with dang's views, he's also known as "the algorithm").
dang != "The Man"
(I have showdead on and 99% of what is deleted is just outright malicious or flame-y.)
I mean there are a number of issues I see with this for me personally.
First of, there is a huge amount of things that I 'should' do or have, plenty of healthy habits, like going for a walk, exercise, reading, meditation, learning an instrument etc, the problem is everything is a time trade, I can only choose to do a few things. To me personally what would having a personal website really give me more than any of those things?
Secondly, I don't think anything I would have to share would be that useful / interesting, I am not an expert in any field and if I just shared every random thought or idea, it would be such a niche mish mash of things, I don't see why it would be of interest to anyone.
What I do is i capture any significant moment of the year on a trello board, then at the end of the year, I take that as a reminder and I write about that year, I go through all my photos on my phone from that year and pick out the relevant ones, I note what I watched, what I listed too, what I did etc and then I email that too myself in gmail with a flag of 'time capsule'.
I also save and backup those particular writeups as PDF's outside of gmail for my personal record, this is great for me, but none of it needs to be public.