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Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

From what I can tell, their solution is to personalize the web by creating personal websites. Here are the 5 steps at the end that they list to construct a personal website:

1. Start small

2. Reduce friction to publishing

3. Don't worry about design

4. Use the IndieWeb

5. Join us in sharing what you've made

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The weakest part is the last one - and it's a big one. Personalsit.es is just a flat single-page directory (of thumbnails, even, not content - so the emphasis is design.) To be part of the conversation, you'd list there and hope someone comes along. Compare with Reddit where you start commenting and you're close-to-an-equal with every other comment.

Webmentions do get you there - because it's a commenting system. But for finding the center of a community, it seems like you're still reliant on Bluesky or Mastodon or something. (Which doesn't "destroy all websites.") Love the sentiment ofc.

Yet no mention of the real friction: buying a domain and getting hosting set up. There are a number of free alternatives out there but they are not well known by the public.

Neocities is fairly well known and often listed in present-day personal website tutorials. Wordpress.com is also still there. Even if you get your own domain & hosting you usually have a nice web interface to drop the htmls into unlike in the old days when you had to FTP into the server and all that.

Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.

There's certain level of friction to everything; that acts as a filter to separate those who choose to proceed anyway and those who don't. If you want to start painting, you have to buy a canvas, an easel, brushes, paint and set aside time to actually do it. Some people will abandon it because they like the concept of being someone who paints more than actually doing it. Some will proceed because they want to paint.

The same goes for website creation. You can post text, pictures and images on any social media site. The independent web is never going to be able to match that level of usability, and IMO it shouldn't try to. Part of the reason the indie web is interesting is because it's full of people who found their way towards wanting to build their own site.

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