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Comment by zoezoezoezoe | Hacker News Reader

I really dont agree with "fully owned", you arent running on anything you actually own ie self-hosting. It's all on the cloud, which dont get me wrong, is pretty cool and helpful, but hardly yours.

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I’m using “fully owned” more in the sense of control rather than infrastructure ownership. The content lives locally, it’s versioned in Git, and everything’s built with open tools. I can move it to another host any time without being locked into a specific platform or format.

I agree it’s not “self-hosted”. But compared to a closed CMS or paid platform, it feels meaningfully more in my hands.

In that sense, everything is "fully owned" and the phrase is meaningless. But in the context of the summary where you're using it, it certainly sounds like you are claiming ownership on the infrastructure

I do agree that the phrasing may be poor, but I see where ingav is coming from, if you're using hosted Wordpress and only keep your data in the Wordpress CMS, if Wordpress disappears today, so does all of your content. Although, that may seem foolish to some of us, there are definitely people out there who do that.

Yup. I'm using Vim + Hugo + GitHub + Netlify in a similar fashion. Just edit my markdown post, git push and it shows up on my website. I used some other static hosting service previously, don't even remember which one, but switching was super easy as I just pointed the output to some other bucket. So the public web hosting provider is completely commoditized and easy to switch from.

Also, I like treating my blog as a version-controlled, declarative "codebase" that's just a bunch of plaintext files (no MySQL tables, XML or JSON to crawl through).

The phrase to use would be something like data ownership. Something more specific.

You don't own for example the comments in this platform or the post that you make on Facebook or writing platforms like substack, if you are using notion you don't your notes

I don't know, where do you draw the line? If I host it myself using nginx running on a VPS, does that count? Or still no, because I don't own the VPS?

What if it's a dedicated machine, colocated? What if it's at home, but I pay an ISP?

edit: Downvoted, care to explain why? I genuinely wrestle with this question. I self-host lots of services at home - and I also self-host services on a cloud VPS, which have better availability and security posture with regards to my home network for things I make public or semi-public. Some have told me this isn't "self-hosting" and I am not sure where the line is drawn.

The cloud VPS isn't self hosting if you don't own the server. It would be like saying that you self-host your email service because you opened a GMail account

So self-hosting refers to hosting the hardware, not the software? Does a colocated dedi count?

I see, I do agree it is nice to have your data fully owned (like really) and safe on device (or devices), though, sometimes it doesnt feel like enough in the ever changing landscape of the internet.

People get protective of the term self hosted, but all I know is that if I search "how to self host" for any open source project, 90% of the guides at least, probably including the project's own docs, will be about installing on a VPS.

Anyway, the important thing is being in control of your own data. With proper off-site backups and reproducible setups using containers, migrating between VPS providers should usually take just a few hours.

I fully understand the arguments for (and against) managing your own server. But I've not been convinced by any arguments for that server being in your house/office rather than a climate controlled warehouse somewhere.

Well, unless you enjoy setting up and managing the physical hardware yourself of course. That's fully reason enough.

I'm definitely in that last camp I like self-hosting with my own hardware on my own network because it's really fun.

I'd go for fully static, which can be served everywhere.

I think blogs should be built like this to make preservation easier. I'd love to have something that make content domain agnostic, more like git that allows cloning and distributing content without forcing people to guess when to pull and archive if they want to keep track of things.

But if they kill your access to those accounts do you have a method to force them to let you back in to get “your” content? Serious question as I self-publish and use a distribution service for my music but I stop short of your claim. I’m an independent rights holder. I don’t own the platforms upon which I choose to distribute my work - terminology does matter and, well, you’re claiming something basically untrue because it sounds cool…that’s my impression.

Why would he need to be 'let back in to get' his content? This is a static site: he's already got it.

As long as domain control isn't lost, he can quickly move from Github to Gitlab/gitee/self hosted and from CloudFlare to Netlify/DO/AWS.

You're getting a lot of pushback but I agree with the sentiment of fully owned. Sure, the git repo and static files are hosted elsewhere for now. But you can easily switch that place any time. Meanwhile all the important stuff: the post data, the code to format them, the domain name, the process itself. That's all in your complete ownership and control. It's a very different bargain than, say, hosting things at wordpress dot com.

But the git repo is also fully on their local computer. Isn't that owning? Just because there's a copy elsewhere does not invalidate the local copy!

If we're going to nitpick that far they'd need to start an ISP and lay their own fibre too

Personally I feel if you can quickly pull out of a provider and host elsewhere with maybe just a config change - aye the data is fully owned, close enough.

Can you make them give it back if they nerf / quash your account? That’s true ownership, in my view.

Git is natively distributed. One would hope he has a local copy of the repo.

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