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Comment by diebeforei485 | Hacker News Reader

It's important to have your own website, so you can post updates there. Use Meta to let people know that there is an update on the site.

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100%. These large social media companies are very capricious about what counts as breaking their rules, will kill your reach at the drop of a hat and will fold under the slightest bit of pressure from someone richer/better connected than you if the latter has any issue with your work or existence at all.

Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.

Having your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.

Web hosting is, or can be a commodity. An organization that gets dropped by its web host can just get another.

Sure, but as long as you own you domain name you're a DNS update away of moving it elsewhere.

As long as? I'm not sure if there's a common way, largely practiced by many people where they don't own their own domain name that they can point anywhere?

It used to be common to let an outside agency run your website, and they may own the domain. It's probably still very common to manage your domain with your hosting company. If you get blacklisted by your hosting company, you may not be able to transfer your domain out.

If someone built you a house and retained the master keys to the house that's more on the buyer being lead through the process more ethically.

I think there's only that risk if you're using a website building service like Wix. If you build your own site and then send it up to a dumb host, you can just send it up to another dumb host when the first one pisses you off. Hopefully, you're at least managing your own DNS records too, and like that service.

There's risk and then there's RISK. A corporate service in the form of a simple VPS is cheap and can be had from a 1000 providers anywhere in the world. Very simple to change providers too. Nothing like the quasi-monopoly of FB/X/YT.

VPS providers are many orders of magnitude simpler and smaller corporate services than social media companies.

Remotely trying to correlate or compare them defies any reasonable semblance of comparability.

You can mail your own server to a co-location service if you want to host the metal yourself.

If you need to go a step further and not rely on one host, it's inexpensive enough to get multiple hosts.

And VPS providers are mostly interchangeable. If one of them goes crazy and starts using AI to randomly ban customers, just take all your toys over to the next one. At the end of the day it's just a commodity root shell.

It seems so obvious to those who know, and non-obvious to those who don't.

I wonder how that bridge at least awareness wise can be improved.

If you have your own* domain and are reasonably diligent in keeping a local backup of your site then it is trivial to move the site to a new host. As others have aaid, web hosting is a commodity business.

* yes, I know...

Web hosting is much, much, much more independent that posting on social media.

Social media is a web app and mobile app.

A website is just a website. Somehow being shut out of your own hosting is something else entirely.

If cloudflare goes out of business, for example, their collapse would not count as an action against speech.

Conflating free speech with Terms of Services is to mix up MANY issues. There is a distinction that must be kept upheld, between private networks, and government power.

This does’t mean that the modern issue of free speech on privately owned platforms is magically solved, just that we need a more precise set of nouns, adjectives and verbs to frame the harms and limits that arise. Otherwise we simply get caught up in the simple between actual free speech and private rights.

No, it's much less of a risk, because companies that sell domain hosting services have an actual financial relationship with you and have much better support infrastructure in place because you're a paying customer. The risk is not zero--no risk is ever zero--but compared to your risk of Facebook doing something stupid and unwarranted and you being unable to get it fixed, the risk with a domain hosting company is pretty small.

I'm not sure if that's still a thing but I remember period where companies were using their fb profiles and messenger to provide customer support. That gave me shivers back then.

Absolutely still going on. They don't even know it's a bad idea.

It is worse now. Customer support on Facebook? Check. Making appointments only through Facebook? CHECK.

I called up some place (yes, via phone) for an appointment, they told me to get one through Facebook.

Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010, it was full of websites managed by individuals. Each site was different, some were pretty-hideous, quite frequently with unusual knowledge and curiosities. It was so much fun to Google them (Google was a damn good search engine back then too). Most people knew how to use FTP to upload a basic HTML page.

Now it's an expert level knowledge, especially amongst younger generation. Private websites are nearly extinct, thanks to (and not only) Google and SEO cancer.

Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.

Brainless as in "We'll just make an account for you"

> Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010

By 1999, Internet Explorer on Windows had over 95% of the web browser market. Modems were 56K. This is not comparable to the web in 2010, much less the web today.

You're experiencing nostalgia - it isn't factual, though.

> Private websites are nearly extinct

I wonder what these password managers are all about, then?

> Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.

How exactly does Meta have any role in the ease or difficulty of content creation? Last I checked Meta makes zero of the top content creation tools and is mostly an ad company.

> You're experiencing nostalgia - it isn't factual, though.

Is this a universal argument against "something was better"? Yes, many things were better in the past, internet included. Now we do things faster, cheaper and worse.

> I wonder what these password managers are all about, then?

Have you ever seen a private website requiring you to register? I haven't. If it does, then it's another sign of how we break simple stuff.

> How exactly does Meta have any role in the ease or difficulty of content creation? Last I checked Meta makes zero of the top content creation tools and is mostly an ad company.

Idk, maybe take a look how Facebook and Instagram work? Posting is super simple, just a few clicks and it's done. So effortless that any brainless individual can do that. People forgot how to do that without those platforms. Even MySpace required some basic knowledge of site building.

> Even MySpace required some basic knowledge of site building.

You're experiencing nostalgia

I get it, you should just know what is happening with your recollection of the past

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