Let's make the indie web easier

I'm not sure I'd recommend shared hosting setups. If you're going that route then you might as well host on WordPress.com or squarespace or whatever.

The logical place to serve is of course from your home machine. These days there are lots of users with good access, good enough to serve. Assuming you don't have a crappy ISP that blocks incoming ports.

Even with a dynamic IP address its trivial for a server to keep its domain updated. (Use a DNS provider that supports APIs, like DNSimple.)

But I'm not sure that the actual headline of this article is necessary. Making your own Web server is easy already. If you don't have the time, or skill, to set up a box now, then you likely don't have the understanding of how much is needed "long term".

Web serving is not like posting to Instagram. It's not fire and forget. It takes long-term maintainence. Keep that DNS alive (with money). Keep that server software updated. Understand "this folder on my machine is public". Keep a casual eye on the automatic certificates. Don't freak out when you see endless scripts probing with strange requests. Monitor the comments section (you want engagement right? Until you discover all your sign ups and comments are spammers.)

So yeah, there's a barrier to entry. But perhaps that's a good thing. Perhaps a "minimum level of effort" acts as a barrier to keep the really unsafe behaviours from becoming universal.

Put another way, my mom should not be hosting a Web server, regardless of how easy it is to do.

I don't know where to begin with this. "here's a challenge for you developers" who exactly are they expecting to find this an interesting task that is worth their time to work on?

If you want it and/or think it should exist, then I'm not stopping you from making it. If you think I should make it, surprisingly, I do not.

Buy squarespace if you don't want to know anything.

You will only have the same problem tomorrow at some other level. Then it will be "you only think clicking on a tar file and figuring out where to unpack it (or where it was even downloaded) is easy because it's easy for you" yeah ok got it.

Do we really? Of course it's OK to have lots of platforms out there (and the author mentions several), but do we need them for the indie web to grow?

The word need is used so many times in this article, but frankly signing up at Wordpress.com or WP Engine is about as easy as it gets and within minutes you have your own site, access to a huge community and the functionality of thousands of plugins, forever guaranteed that if the host becomes a dick you can just export everything and switch to someone else, etc. The author is talking about having stuff that's easy to install but you don't have to install anything. Self-install and self-host are frankly a non-starter if you want easy, that's not just a technical/UX problem, it's support/maintenance/etc that takes raw hours. WP has been so successful precisely because it's easy for a total novice to get up and running, and there are dozens of hosts who do the plumbing work for you. I'd argue this is a model for something like Mastodon to aspire to.

What is unbelievably easy:

1. Generating a website

2. Writing content locally

3. Adding media to your local site

4. Making your website available on the network

5. Giving your website a meaningful name with DNS

6. Sharing your website name with your friends

And it’s unbelievably easy to pave that path for non-technical users.

What is unbelievably hard:

1. Finding a reliable route between your friends and your local website

The network you publish to isn’t the network your friends are on. You are on a subnet. And the identifier for your subnet is dynamic. And the identifier for your friends subnet is dynamic.

On the modern web, it’s easier for two devices on the same street in Illinois to rendezvous at a datacenter in Virginia than it is to find a stable and reliable route to the device down the street.

The web isn’t broken. The internet is.

The web is an overlay network on top of the internet. We need a better internet.

Personally, I believe libp2p is that better internet.

So arguing for making independent websites easier is really arguing for another level of granularity in the tradeoffs between “social media presence” and “Wordpress”. And I guess I’m not really sold that that’s all that helpful. The loss of discoverability is a step function you hit the moment you go independent, which means that for the vast majority of cases, there’s going to be a “dead zone” of value where having slightly more control just isn’t worth it. I’m just not sure that that dead zone doesn’t end pretty close to where the current tools are.

Of course, now we like things a little more content focused, but the point still stands, what people need is free or cheap cloud hosting with zero sysadmin work, just pure edit some pages and then have people see them, ideally with some builtin web ring type discovery features.

Any amount of tech work repels anyone other than the tinkerers who don't mind tech that needs maintenance. Usually that means all the content is just about web tech, specifically how much they hate modern bloated stuff.

Also, remember, proboards forums were almost was much of a defining element as personal sites, and were every bit as personal and indie.

Give us forums where you can set per-thread and post custom themes, hyperlink between posts, show threads in a one post at a time mode, lock threads to just you and friends, and filter posts in a thread by tag, and you're probably most of the way there to an accessible indie web.

Markdown + CSS is probably enough for almost all users.

Add the ability to import and export threads and move them to another server if needed, and

If you want interactive content, provide some sandboxed prefab options, like a Gameboy emulator you can make roms for on GB studio and attach to posts, or just give every use a subdomain for arbitrary files they can put into iframes, GitHub.io style.

The sandbox attribute is in 98% of browsers, maybe there's a way to just block the other 2% from seeing iframes, to be fully safe.

- https://www.weebly.com/

- https://www.squarespace.com/ (the one with sponsored segments in every YouTube video)

- https://www.ionos.com/websites/website-builder. IONOS is a domain registrar, most other domain registrars (at least namecheap) offer website builders as well.

The keyword is "WYSIWYG". These site builders are targeted for non-tech-savvy people who want an easy solution, they include publishing and not a single line of code or terminal is required.

Host on Netlify for free. Zero server headaches.

I haven't used it, but seems in line with these goals.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38809145

The serving technology is hard.

The dollar cost is high.

The maintenance burden is high.

The authoring experience sucks.

The notification / distribution mechanisms are lacking.

The feedback loops are broken.

Social media sites are simple, free, zero-maintenance, trivial to post, notify/distribute to your friends and others, and build in a feedback system with both automated and human curation.

There's an enormous amount of effort required to provide even a remotely similar level of service.

I’ve extracted out the GitHub fetching into a small npm package: https://github.com/cool-calm/collected-press/tree/main/packa...

And here’s my home page using this approach. The code needs to be cleaned up and I’m still working out the best strategy for caching (Cloudflare KV has been disappointing), but I’m happy with this as a model. https://github.com/RoyalIcing/RoyalIcing

I could spin up a docker and nginx, set up my router to allow port forwarding, but the ISP will stand in my way. Port 80 or port (8)433 won't come through.

No amount of tech on my raspberry-pie will let me self host.

I kinda do hate Wordpress. I hate that it's so inefficient. It optimises for authors not readers, in that it's easy for authors to create sites and posts, but to display a post to a reader it has to fetch everything from the database and then process all the PHP code into HTML and only finally actually serve it to the user. It needs an actual server, and a database, and all that maintenance and updates, etc.

I want Hugo with a GUI (and ideally runs on a phone). Something that pushes to a static page (so free hosting on Git??b/Cloudflare/whatever) but doesn't make me jump through all the hoops that Hugo does.

You're over-optimizing the very first step for a crowd of folks who are likely watching advanced Blender tutorials right now.

What you're not considering is that most people who want to create today are primarily interested in doing it on YouTube or TikTok. This is partly generational, and partly because YouTube has an entirely viable monetization mechanism for those who put in the work.

Being able to host a website just by putting files in a certain folder already present with a special icon was a magical feature for my then girlfriend.

I could spin up a docker and nginx, set up my router to allow port forwarding, but the ISP will stand in my way. Port 80 or port 433 won't come through.

No amount of tech on my raspberry-pie will let me self host.

Indeed, why not let them copy a Word document without even zipping anything (maybe even with a button within Word itself to avoid files and folders)? No need to learn any new typesetting systems, Word in the knowledge a lot of non-tech folks have

What is currently the best option / WordPress alternative to start an indie site in this way without using the console?

(Edited to add link because I accidentally hit send...)

https://www.indexhibit.org/

LOL ... vi still works for me or nano if I'm feeling lazy.