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Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

> It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. The IndieWeb doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate in it.

I have a different viewpoint on this.

The non-independent web which is largely controlled by faceless corporations has never been bigger or more able to hurt the average person. Someone who gets locked out of their Google account today is at risk of getting their entire life turned upside down -- and they don't even get to argue their case via phone call!

Thus, fostering an independent web and making sure more and more people can build their presence outside of the BigCorp stranglehold can be said to be more like growing vegetables in wartime, similar to a victory garden [1]. It's more of a necessity than something that's great to have.

Sure, no one from the IndieWeb organization signed up for this mission. But they, along with things like RSS, Matrix, Mastodon, and the Bluesky protocol are the nearest glimpses we have of an open web that exists outside regulation-capturing trillion-dollar corporations. So I would entreat their leaders to be a bit more forgiving if critics express frustration at the difficult user interfaces.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

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I did an attempt to grow some vegetables for „war time”. It is pretty much useless. Amounts are too much to consume at once and not enough to consume for longer periods. Putting it into jars is an option but then cost goes up as you need to boil loads of water. Then as mentioned amount to sustain family of 3 for whole year I would have to spend way too much time in it, not even starting on possible diseases that could wipe out crop.

Statistics also show that people in the cities eat much more vegetables than people in the country side - if you exclude potatoes. I don’t want to eat potatoes only.

Exactly the same with self hosting or even running my own blog on VPS - it is nice as a side hobby. But if I have to prevent any DDoS that is already too much to handle and I am DevOps by trade and we buy anti DDoS services.

Unless I am forced to do gardening for survival or I wouldn’t have anything else to do with my time there is no upside for maintaining garden or maintaining self hosted stuff, just a nerdy fantasy because it all takes too much time and people have much more things to do in life.

Nerdy fantasy is having all kinds of vegetables freshly picked - war time reality is eating old potatoes from the cellar.

This might be climate dependent.

Here in the subtropics, I've found it relatively easy to get the majority of our fruits and veggies from our backyard, with things like papayas and panama berries producing year round. In temperate climates you'll have more difficulty though.

I think there are many upsides of maintaining a garden: you learn how to grow different crops (that you wouldn’t if you didn’t grow a garden) and how to combat disease, you get fresh air, vitamin d and an occasion to wind down, you get to eat your own veggies which taste far better than store bought for the simple fact that you grew them yourself. Maybe it doesn’t make you self sustainable in case of war, but it sure gives you the basics over someone who has never grown anything…

Definitely, especially since in the case of war e.t.c., rationing is likely to be in effect. You'll get enough to live, but you'll probably be wanting for a little extra.

> Amounts are too much to consume at once and not enough to consume for longer periods.

Sounds interesting. Some techniques one can use to mitigate that:

- spread plantations overtime

- use early/normal/late variety

Other techniques ideas than jar:

- sun dry (fruits): boost vitD at the same time

- dark and fresh basement (potatoes, squashes…)

- fermentation (fruits, leaves, roots, ANYTHING!) there’s a bunch of man-old techniques to conserve your vegetable. They’ll keep many nutrients and add some probiotics. Kimchy, pickles (super easy)…

It's nice physical activity, satisfying, healthy, makes me happy to go out, Also not everything is priced the same. If i wanted to cut back i'd still grow some stuff that's easy to grow but for some reason expensive here. I get to give some stuff away that's hard to preserve. And when winter comes....yeah i go to the store more often because i totally could but don't like eating only frozen, canned, pumpkins, beets, carrots, & leftover kale/winter spinach, etc Is there a problem with that?

>Statistics also show that people in the cities eat much more vegetables than people in the country side - if you exclude potatoes. I don’t want to eat potatoes only.

I'm very confused how that has to do with anything?

>But if I have to prevent any DDoS that is already too much to handle and I am DevOps by trade and we buy anti DDoS services.

I'd have some serious questions if someone were to feel the need to ddos my blog. But I think some ddos protection comes with my ovh plan. I could be running on some rpi in a closet but i don't in the same way that i could be seedsaving but don't.

> I'm very confused how that has to do with anything?

Presumably people in the country are more easily able to grow vegetables. If they aren't doing it, then it implies that growing vegetables isn't worth the time.

I think there are other confounding factors like income and education.

I would say one confounding factor is city people can get by on a salad an quinoa. If you live and work in country side beans, potatoes, meat are must have in a diet.

Alternative take, but I get a lot of value from gardening as complimentary to supermarkets.

I normally grow potatoes, carots etc, and have an apple tree, and several herbs like dill, mint, thyme etc that pretty much manage themselves. It's very far from meaning I never need to shop again, and like you pointed out, to get to that point you'd pretty much need to quit your job and work full time growing food.

That said, it does add a bit of resillience into the system (as well as being rewarding) in the same way having solar panels might shield you from energy cost fluctuations without totally removing your dependence on the grid. I save a lot of money on fresh herbs, and never need to buy apples during season.

Since you tried it, you now have now developed some skills to be able to raise some vegetables if you're in a real pickle (ha!).

Maybe that is the most valuable thing from such a garden: not being totally helpless if the need does arise for some reason.

And when that does, there are probably more people around to trade different foods with, perhaps.

You do know, that a garden in reality takes longer to produce food, than in stardew valley?

If a breakdown comes, I am probably busy with other things, than planting seeds and tending to the weeds.

I like gardening, because it gives good fresh food. And not (anymore) because I think I will be better prepared for a post apocalyptical world. I'd rather invest in a hunting rifle for that.

So, knowing that growing food is difficult is good knowledge to have right?

Yes, also knowing how to grow food is good knowledge.

(And I regret a bit my condescending question above)

> Amounts are too much to consume at once and not enough to consume for longer periods.

This depends on what you grow. Squashes and root vegetables can last for months in a cool dark location at home.

Growing food is secondary to storing food. If you just grow your own food without thinking about preservation, it's very easy to run into the situation you mention. Where you have a larger harvest of something than you are able to use at once, and no method of keeping it from spoiling.

Conversely, if you know how to pickle and can, and have a chest freezer and maybe a food processor, it's very easy to buy bulk amounts of vegetables when they are in season and store for later. You get basically the same benefits as with growing your own, for much less effort, and quite possibly less expense.

Alternatively, something that doesn't seem to be mentioned so far in this comment threads, is befriending your neighbors and gifting them what vegetables/fruits they don't have and them doing the same to you, hopefully leading to less stock of everything but more variety.

One potential problem I see is that if your neighbors are into gardening, they're likely to have had the same type of things do well that particular season. So sure, if your neighbor has some apple variety you don't, you can swap. Or your broccoli for their cauliflower or other Brassica. But it might not mean that much for variety in the end.

But giving food away and getting nothing in return is preferable to having it spoil, obviously. And every situation is different.

I do agree that things are harder when you do them then when random people advertise them on the internet.

That being said, things do evolve in time, and while I can't talk about gardening, I find it much easier to host a small website today than 20 years ago, both in terms of personal time and cost. There is a generic fashion to ignore tools and automation in the detriment of "finished products", but even with this, I do feel that tools got better. Not sure it is the case for gardening, but I do wonder if it is not just a matter of initial investment.

You're right that it's not realistic for most people to grow enough food to be self-sufficient - but it doesn't take a lot of effort to grow enough food to make a difference.

I usually grow runner beans (8 or 9 plants, and maybe some climbing French beans too) and courgettes (2 or three plants, ideally different varieties) - both of which are high-yield for a relatively small amount of space, and both of which freeze successfully. I really don't have to spend much time on doing that - basically just a case of making sure they have enough water.

I'm now on my last bag of runner beans from last season, and I might actually buy some in about a month's time.

Pumpkins or other winter squash will keep for several months after harvesting provided they reached full maturity before picking, and provided you treat them carefully.

Am I self-sufficient? No, nowhere near it. Have I made a noticeable difference to my food bill? Most definitely.

> Amounts are too much to consume at once and not enough to consume for longer periods. Putting it into jars is an option but then cost goes up as you need to boil loads of water

This is a strange take. Food preservation methods have been around for hundreds of thousands of years now, there are a myriad of ways to store excess produce, it's not all just about jarring for example.

Most former Soviet families do this every autumn. Storage is the problem, not labor.

I think the biggest obstacle are the "getting started", and then "actually owning it" parts. I registered my domain with Gandi (who have also initially hosted my email), got a VM from Hetzner, set me up some nginx, and I was good for a while.

Then Gandi dropped their "no bullshit" motto and wanted €48/y to renew a €12 domain; I transferred it away to MrDomain, plugged my email into iCloud, and since I didn't actually need a VM, Netlify is now my web host (with Hugo as the blog engine). Now I want to move away from non-EU companies and facing another crisis.

The fact that you can do it at all is a welcome sign for individuals who desire digital independence. But every step of the way, I needed sysadmin expertise, and also now have to shop around for a whole bunch of new providers.

What is a DNS record? Why can't I set up CNAME on a naked domain? Why is it so difficult to find out the correct IMAP/SMTP settings? Why do I need a PC, a text editor, and git to publish a link with a 20-word comment? Why is $PROVIDER integrating with Github only, while git has always been non-centralised?

There has to be a better way. There are countless providers that will offer you a DNS+email+web hosting package, but there will always be shortcomings (e.g. running a blog engine that is not Wordpress; Wix is impossibly slow and clunky; etc), and moving to a different provider is pure pain even for experts.

And then, self-hosting even the most basic apps, like an RSS reader, bookmarks, calendar/TODO? No providers will get you the full package, you have to resort to a VM of some kind and do the expert-level twiddling, likely including setting up Postgres somewhere along the way. Assuming you have the knowledge: cryptominers destroyed the free tier on anything that needs compute; it doesn't matter if you need 30min of CPU and 100MB of transfer per month, you will end up with a bunch of extra bills and several moving parts.

You could argue that gardening also requires knowledge and maintenance. But free software and open protocols are about reusing existing building blocks. You never ever had to write an email client.

I want the experience of installing stuff from the App Store. I want the experience of changing web browsers, where the new one just imports bookmarks and history from what you've been using to date. Even if it's adversarial compatibility.

It should not matter if I'm a noob or if I've been a sysadmin for the past 10 years. Even if the latter is the case, I still value my free time, and don't want to take my work back home.

What's your point here?

Doing things yourself is hard. Doing things in a way that reuses other people's effort should be slightly easier.

Doing something that that is defined by "doing it all yourself", like growing your own veg, or, running/hosting your own website is going to be very hard.

I feel this is one of the biggest single things I have learned with age (specifically in my 30s) that has actually changed my life in a way that I believe younger me couldn't/wouldn't be able to grasp: there is no easy way to do things yourself, but that is the value in doing things yourself. Do things for yourself, not because they are easy...

> There has to be a better way.

There is another way. But any other way is either going to involve someone else doing part of it for you, or it's equally as hard.

Completely agree with your general gist.

As someone who built websites in the 1990s, I too am amazed by how hard it still is to do something as ostensibly simple as publish text.

My conclusion is this: DNS and hosting are just inappropriate overkill for individuals. There's the setup hurdle, then the ongoing security and maintenance of software, and finally the problem that hosting is just fragile, with no internal inertia - if you stop paying, your site goes away or gets squatted. All this just to have one's own domain? In the end, for any site, the only link that will survive is the one on the Internet Archive.

I now tend to the view that domains and hosting and software maintenance are best left to organizations. Individuals should instead pool their resources and publish on shared platforms. There's no reason these need be corporate. The fediverse, for instance, is giving us new publishing options almost every day.

I think expectations not to pay for things are one of the reasons people give up control to companies - you complain about 48 eur and not having a free tier, but you also mention you want stuff.

I decided for myself to use less free services. Either I find them useful and I should pay for them (and demand improvements), or I shouldn't expect that stuff is "provided" to me without some downsides (ads, etc.).

I am grateful that so many people made things more accessible and easier by building all the open source and free software! That's an immense work already, not recognized enough, and (probably) put off a bit by people that demand stuff without wanting to learn and understand the details.

> you complain about 48 eur and not having a free tier, but you also mention you want stuff.

I don't mind paying. Hardware has to be manufactured, infrastructure has to be kept up. I paid for my phone and my computer, I keep paying the electricity and Internet bills. Heck, imagine this: I also buy software. (€48/y for domain renewal is still robbery by the way.)

My problem is: I already paid for all these different services, still have to do all of the integration work by myself, and then when the need arises, I have to start paying for yet-another thing (e.g. a VPS) that in addition to integration now also requires maintenance effort on my part. And then, when I need to change providers, I have to redo a considerable chunk of that work, by myself.

> [...] demand stuff without wanting to learn and understand the details.

This is a lose-lose arrangement. High bar to adoption means fewer users. Lost users will never contribute any value back. (How to get existing users to contribute is an entirely separate issue.)

My complaint also has almost nothing to do with free software. What I want is easy and painless setup, integration, and (when things don't work out) migration. When you signed up with your ISP, they came to your house, maybe ran some cables, plugged a router into the wall - and you can now enjoy WiFi on every device you own, and "it" doesn't care if the traffic is DNS, HTTP, IMAP+SMTP, or Quake. Yet if you want your own DNS, HTTP, IMAP+SMTP, and Quake, each of these is its own little nightmare.

If you want to change the ISP for any reason, the process is more or less the same - the worst "technical" part is you will have to type a new WiFi password on every device. Most people can't explain the difference between "the WiFi" and "the Internet", and even those who do will look funny at you when you bring up FTTH vs FTTP. Because all of it just works, and makes people's lives better by being so.

Do you see the asymmetries? Can you imagine a world where owning your digital presence was just as painless?

You're comparing something generic, like an internet connection, to a personal website. They're not really similar.

It sounds like you want to be able to express yourself personally, but you don't want to be personally responsible for what you use to express yourself.

Have you considered social networks? E.g. twitter and facebook: they're pretty painless to setup, integration isn't easy but is well documented. Migration isn't nailed yet, but mastodon and bluesky have approaches to that covered, so how about them?

Goalpost moved error.

It's not the job of the indie web to repair the damage that bungling regulators and lawmakers cause with their laissez-faire attitude towards the megacorps. Cleanig up this deeply corrupt system cannot be done by the indie web, however much we wish it could.

>The non-independent web which is largely controlled by faceless corporations has never been bigger or more able to hurt the average person

I disagree with this one pretty strongly because it's important to consider it in relation to the amount of internet users.

The early web was less corporate largely just due to its small size. If you take into account the number of users I'd argue that the corporate web peaked about 10 - 15 years ago, ever since then there's been a gradual shift towards more diversity. If you grew up in the AOL messenger and Yahoo news era not only was it corporate, but there was one corporation for like, everything. In 2010 you had effectively 1 social network, Facebook. Internet Explorer had a marketshare of 95% at its peak.

Today it's still heavily commercial but that's not the same as corporate. There's a lot of alternatives now, Signal, Telegram, niche decentralized alternatives, direct consumer facing creator focused platforms like substack, patreon, onlyfans etc. Even Amazon to me seems way less central and with more alternatives than it did 5-7 years ago. Netflix has more competitors, as a software developer you have a much healthier open source and linux ecosystem, and so on.

You have to have some pretty heavy rose tinted glasses on if you think creators, devs or endusers had more choice on the internet 20 years ago than they do now.

Twenty years ago, the norm was to email your personal "social network" using a completely standardized and decentralized protocol.

Twenty years ago, the norm was to maintain a bookmark list of personally maintained websites you might visit in your online time, using a completely standardized protocol distributed across hosts ranging from home PC's to closet racks to countless disparate ISP's, universities, and hosting providers.

Twenty years ago, the norm was to have topical conversations with strangers using completely standardized protocols using decentralized or federated networks (NNTP and IRC).

Twenty years ago, the norm was to trade with and organize within your community on minimalist bulletin boards that took no fees and had almost no rules.

Twenty years ago, the norm was still that you kept most of your purchases in your local economy, but when you chose to remove money from your local economy (a certain kind of travesty, now become the norm), you did so with nearly unmediated relationship with far away merchants, with only a few points in fees being absorbed by agencies situated in between.

Twenty years ago, the norm was that when you bought digital media, you received a commodity copy of it that you could duplicate and access and re-encode as you saw fit.

Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media and share it freely with others using numerous clever protocols to overcome bandwidth and accountability concerns, all decentralized.

True, twenty years ago, you did not get to have trivial access to trivial interactions with celebrities. You did not get endless streams of trivial headlines about trivial things. You did not get to drone out to endless autoplay of trivial videos. You did not get to monetize your own trivialities so easily.

Frankly, having been around for twenty years and then quite a few more, I have no idea what you're talking about in your comment.

>Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media

No it wasn't. It was the norm among an ingroup of technically savy young people who, on HN, always confuse themselves with the average user at the time. A normal guy two decades ago was as the other commenter above points out, accessing the internet through a bunch of apps provided by their ISP (it's where the name comes from) a sort of vertically integrated company town, likely completely reliant on proprietary software that was so monopolistic, like IE, it sucked completely. When was browser choice better, then or now?

If you're an average user, not an average hacker in 2025 you have significantly more ways to avoid "big corpo" than you did back then. You weren't on IRC as a normie in 2005, you were on AIM and ICQ, also AOL owned of course. The norm, as in for a normal person, was to engage with the web and the world of computing to two, maybe three mega-companies, they weren't torrenting, ripping and re-encoding media.

No, the "normal guy" was downloading Napster and Limewire and 100 other applications from fly-by-night publishers, following folklore suggestions on how to get everything they could for free, getting into messy encounters on Craigslist, visiting independently hosted warez sites, infecting their PC with all kinds of crap, etc, exactly because it was easy and exciting and inviting to do so.

Largely, the most "technically savvy young people" who you're engaging with on HN these days were not doing those things, but were complaining on their many independent and decentralized communities about all the headaches involved in incessantly being brought in to help those people clean up their messes.

Twenty years ago, it was the wild west. Those who had savvy had staked their claims and knew how to survive safely, but the news had made it to everybody else and rails had been laid and all the starry eyed naive people were flooding in to an exciting, if dangerous, new world of novelty and opportunity. It was very different than what we have now, and grossly less consolidated.

Were you by any chance in college 20 years ago?

Absolutely none of this tracks for me, it smacks of someone extrapolating their tiny niche to the entire world.

PS: Limewire was loaded with browser toolbars and malware. The definition of corporate hell.

I was very much not.

And I agree that the uncountably many software publishers of the time were aggressively experimenting with the dark monetization patterns that Doubleclick, Facebook, Google, Amazon and others were soon to refine into what are now only a handful of ~trillion dollar business engines.

Of course there was corporate participation in that era, but following the dot-com boom and its bust, the scale and number of these operations was very different than the small-and-consolidated Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy era of a decade before and equally different than titanic-and-consolidated Facebook/Google/Amazon era a decade later.

Browser toolbars came from shady websites, not limewire. Limewire was for Trojans Source: I was doing amateur mallet research 20 years ago

The official installer literally shipped with ask.com Toolbar.

I was in college even earlier, and living in a third world country to boot.

Every single soul in my class was pirating music online.

Napster was a blip (too early, very few had pcs) and only the tech saavy used it, but Kazaa, Soulseek and Limewire were absolutely huge among my cohort.

Btw I asked German friends my age and pretty much all of them have a similar experience.

Emule. Even the older relatives of my SO knew about it.

> It was the norm among an ingroup of technically savy young people

This is a mainstream mass-market advert from Apple in 2001:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Apples-Rip-Mix-Burn-camp...

"Rip. Mix. Burn."

I think you're totally wrong.

Normies were pirating movies and series like crazy in Europe even on blue-collar homes.

and another 20 years prior to that, we had mixed tapes, from a friend who had one of those dual deck tape recorders, or VHS copies (alas poor Betamax) from that friend who worked in the video store that had access to multiple video recorders.

Nothing has really changed, has it? Just the speed and scope of access has increased, and the mass of noise amidst the (hopefully still existing after AI aftermath) quality signal (by magnitudes).

Twenty years ago you would use IM protocols and forums; IRC and Usenet were for die hard hardcore nerds/geek/academics.

The early web was largely academic, not corporate. I was there when it switched over. You’re describing a time period after the dot com crash as the early internet, but it was around before that and was quite nice actually. I was a kid back then, we learned in junior high school how to upload our hand-edited websites via ftp over dial up internet, and the companies that intermediated the internet to us were ISPs not advertising companies. I suppose AOL was an exception but nobody I know used it and would have been made fun of for doing so.

I think you've misread the comment. They never called the "more corporate" era of 10-15 years ago the "early web", they were describing it as distinct from the even earlier "early web", which seems to be the same early web you're fond of.

I think the two of you agree about those time periods, they were just pointing out that they believe the peak sad, stale, corporate internet period was not now, but actually a decade or so ago.

FWIW I agree with them. I think people who romanticize the early days of the internet are quick to dismiss what we have currently just because it isn't exactly the same as what they remember. There's plenty of online spaces that have the same vibes on today's internet, and they have the same or even more users as they did back then (because there were a lot less overall users back in those days - like multiple orders of magnitude less - a small slice of the pie today is bigger than the whole thing ~30 years ago), they're just in different places and in different shapes.

Oops, thanks for the explanation.

I would join you but I'm busy making sure everyone is drinking out of paper straws to save the environment.

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