Hacker News Reader

Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

[stub for offtopicness]

[submitted title was "How I Blog with Obsidian, Hugo, GitHub, and Cloudflare – Zero Cost, Fully Owned"]

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.

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.

What do you mean "fully owned"? There is no mention of that in the post

Edit: I guess you mean the content itself is still on your machine if the services go away, and you can choose to host them elsewhere

By "fully owned," I mean that I control the entire stack:

- Content is just Markdown files in my local Obsidian vault

- Hugo builds the site locally - no dependency on external editors or platforms

- GitHub is just used for version control and deployment

- Cloudflare Pages handles static hosting, but I can move it elsewhere anytime

Thank you for your post, it's very sensible setup. Does Cloudflare Pages offer unlimited bandwidth?

Thank you. Yes they offer unlimited bandwidth.

While "fully owned" is ambiguous, the only other term I can think of here would be "fully portable", which has other connotations, so it's probably the best term for this.

Would be nice to coin an unambiguous term for this as it's a useful design goal.

I don't think there is a good term in the context of the Internet. Or offline for that matter. Even if you printed your blog and handed it out on street corners, for it to be "fully owned" would that mean you make your own ink and paper?

So I agree in the sense that, you're always going to rely on something. Even if you're hosting on hardware you own at your house, using your own self-signed SSL certificates, you're still relying on an internet connection from some company.

But, I think using the term "fully-owned" to refer to pushing up to GitHub, then deploying to Cloudflare Pages is definitely not "fully-owned"

What I meant by "fully-owned" is really about owning the content and the workflow: everything lives locally in plain text, versioned in Git, and built with open tools. I can move it to any host without being locked into a platform or losing anything.

You're right that hosting on GitHub and Cloudflare isn't infrastructure ownership. I should’ve been more precise with the wording.

It would mean you owned the ink and paper.

The OP's fully owned is analogous to someone else doing the printing for the privelege of spying on your readers.

"Vendor-agnostic" maybe? It's not perfect but I get where OP is coming from. Personally, the use of the term is completely reasonable.

You're being obtuse. Paper and ink are fungible commodities. Try again.

Not “fully-owned” though if you need external services to do the heavy lifting. I think they mean deployed onto a personal vps.

It's deployed onto Cloudflare Pages - I think this is 100% the opposite of fully-owned.

I think the point is that it's not someone else's blogging service. If CF or GH die, you can port this to some other platform or your own server without losing anything, compared to e.g. blogger.

Yes. That's exactly what I meant. The content is not locked-down and is fully portable.

As long as they use their own domain and have that registered with some other registrar they can trivially move the blog to any other hoster, including a random VPS. So while the current setup depends on github and cloudflare they don't hold much power over him.

It's not really fully-owned, but it's owned in the ways that matter most

"Fully-owned" when it's relying on GitHub Pages, Hugo, Obsidian and Cloudflare to function.

Two of which are services operated by a corporate entity and one of which is a closed source piece of software.

The only thing "owned" here is the fact that the entire blog is simple markdown and the domain name. However, that doesn't mean it's very portable. It's not impossible, but it's a lot more work than I would want to do.

Obsidian is just a very convenient markdown editor. You could rip and replace it with another editor trivially. You just don't get the convenient UI

I'd argue it is, because it's portable to any other service. As in you own all the content and methods to generate it.

But he doesn’t. If Cf or Gh go down he has to reconfigure the whole mess. Portability != full-ownership.

As a corporate senior eng, this does't look like a mess to me - just a few things, easily configurable in the matter of hours. My only concern would be if Cloudflare pages offer truly unlimited bandwidth, but so far the site is live. :-)

No matter what host it's on, even if you run it at your house, if something goes down you'll need to do the same.

The internet as a whole relies on a huge variety of services all working as they should.

If he hosts from his house, if he loses internet he'll still have to reconfigure the whole mess. We don't own anything.

So we’re agreed, “fully-owned” is not the correct choice of words.

“Zero cost” until cloudflare management decide to kill the free program.

There are so many other services that allow you to host static pages for free though, at least currently.

Obsidian, Hugo, Github, Cloudflare ... none of those are owned by you.

The idea is to use them as tools that get the job done and get out of the way, while you own the content. All of these tools are easily replaceable and the pipeline can still publish to the final blog domain without any worry.

Obsidian is just an editor for markdown files, Hugo is open source. If we can't count open source as "self-owned" then god no one owns anything because pretty much no one runs their computer on a OS they build from scratch with no contributors or using any existing code.

Obsidian is just a markdown editor, so the files are portable. The context is that the content and methods to publish it are not someone elses.

You do not own it (unless if it's you who released it to run on a platform you don't own)

not your atoms, not your bits

Reply on news.ycombinator.com