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Comment by hellcow | Hacker News Reader

> I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access

A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing online...

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I think the point the author is trying to make is more so about these mini networks on their own LAN, which their family uses. (And maybe dreaming of a neighbourhood utility LAN as a middle ground between LAN in your house and WAN as just a trunk to a big ISP node) The full quote is

    - A Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a 3 gigabyte hard drive setup as a "server" (makes this site available on my home network[9])
    - I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access (I have the least expensive subscription for this)
    ...
    [9] I can view my personal web on my home network from my phone, tablet and computers. So can the rest of my family.

The equivalent self contained home server exists today in the homelab community, either with Mac Minis or NAS systems running Unraid or TrueNAS with community apps. Add in Tailscale on top for remote access.

What’s needed is a lot of work on the software front to make it much easier, with interoperable standards. Self-hosted WYSYWIG options as easy to use as the social media tools for photos and writing and social posts. Ability to run distributed chatroom style instances with tracker like discoverability to replace Discord. Built in backup options with easy offsite backup replication.

hes like these off-gridders that use iphones.... larping some kind of self-sufficieny, whilst being firmly tied to industrialised society and completely unwilling to sever the link

At least they can comfort themselves with the fact that their iPhones support Lockdown Mode XD

Yeah I think the author made a mistake framing his idea as something bigger than it is. Basically only serves to draw that conclusion if he pitches it as a fight against big tech.

But just saying people should homelab more is totally cromulent.

> But just saying people should homelab more is totally cromulent.

it embiggens even the smallest lan

There's a whole meme subgenre dedicated to this type of argument. Search for "Yet you participate in society, curious!"

Except there are a ton of alternatives to hosting on Github that are not owned by one of the large companies he's railing against.

Except it's completely different.

You cannot "not participate in society" in a meaningful way. But you can self-host a blog. Especially for someone tech-savvy enough to talk about web technology.

But then you need to fight bots day and night and do some serious sandboxing on your server which you might be using for other things and is likely to have other accessible endpoints for people to exploit.

You also might not want your IP to be indexed by crawlers. Offloading the burden of hosting onto an already public site mitigates a lot of those issues.

If it wasn't Github it would be Gitlab, if not Gitlab, somewhere else I'm sure.

The point being you shouldn't need to soapbox from your doorstep, but use the commons as intended

"But then you need to fight bots day and night and do some serious sandboxing on your server which you might be using for other things and is likely to have other accessible endpoints for people to exploit."

For a static read-only website? No, that's not necessary.

Yes, but that person owns their website, its content, and the address it lives at. They can publish anything they want, in any format they want.

Hosting on GitHub is merely a convenience; they can up and leave anytime.

in this case, they're on a github.io subdomain, which they don't own.

Yes agreed.

It is possible through what he says. I’ve made fx [1] exactly for the purpose of the author. Wordpress but written in Rust for efficiency and loads of unneeded features omitted. Publishing is not via static site generator because the time between edit and seeing the result was too long for me. It does use Markdown for the posts and has built-in backup to Git functionality. I’m using it for my blog and like it a lot since I can quickly use it to jot down notes [2].

[1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx

[2]: https://huijzer.xyz/

But Github's publishing is at least _highly_ portable. You could move the same web site to a vanilla nginx setup on some random domain.

The nice part here is that you can update your site via git version control, and have easy rollback etc... assuming you can deal with git.

I don't think it's such a problem to have big corporations involved in your publishing efforts; the problem is when they lock users in with proprietary technology, and create barriers to entry like high costs and technical complexity.

I don't have a need to mix anticapitalist fervor with the desire for an easy way to make durable, portable web sites. The internet has always involved paying some kind of piper. Corporations are too big & monopolization is a problem, but one thing at a time...

You can publish anywhere with git, it doesn't even need to be Github or a Git host, it can be a shared hosting account or your own server. There is literally no value add that Github offers in this regard other than visibility and implied cred with the tech community. No big corporations need to be involved.

For reals. I love the general premise behind the article, but to me how you publish it, and how others access it, is the sauce. Creating static sites is hardly the problem.

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