11 ms·

A radical idea, lets all go back to blogs, hosted and owned by ourselves, on our own sites, which will enrich only us, and where you can write as long and as sh

A radical idea, lets all go back to blogs, hosted and owned by ourselves, on our own sites, which will enrich only us, and where you can write as long and as short as you want, and link to whatever you want.

phyzome 8y ago
I have such nostalgia for the blogosphere. The one thing it's missing is post privacy; I want to be able to journal privately (like on Dreamwidth) but also use my own hosting and not rely on someone else's platform. I've been toying around with writing my own social media software along those lines, using servers. Some noodling about on that topic: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/ https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/
- bena 8y ago
  That doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle.
- drharby 8y ago
  I figure any cms could offer that via privileges
  - phyzome 8y ago
    Sure! And that's what Dreamwidth offers... except I can't run my own DW. (Well, it's open source so I could, but it's kind of huge, and I would be the only user!) I'm basically thinking of federated DW.
    - stevenicr 8y ago
      self hosted wordpress does all this out of the box I think. I have one site where I have public posts and pages and some pages are "password protected" - so they are viewable by a select few associates, and a few pages are either saved as draft or pulished privately in the admin backedn / dashboard - which makes it easy to retrieve and edit and such. There are free plugins like buddypress wihch can make more complex systems, private, public, semi-private groups for friends and content, stuff like that. Many others like s2member and such. only trickery is if you have a widget displaying a list of published "pages" on your site, you may need to get into that widget and tell it to not display page 10398 if that is one you are trying to keep under wraps and yet be available for your secret friends, published, but not listed as another comment mentions with docuwiki, and I think youtube has a similar option. there are many auto backup options with basic free plugins too, so I think WP would cover what you are describing. Definitely need added security plugins as these are auto targetted for breaking into regularly, good ones are free and available. You could always put it in a sub folder and add in an htaccess extra htpasswd to lock it down further and such of course as well.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  This doesn't sound like a use-case for a Web site to me. How about sending yourself emails, categorised into their own maildir or IMAP folder, or even a brand new account? That would inherit security from your email setup (which is monotonically more secure than systems which delegate password resetting to your email account). You can read and write them online or offline using a variety of readers and editors, including some self-hosted browser-based clients (e.g. RoundCube, etc.). You also get a bunch of tooling for free, e.g. for backups (offlineimap, isync, etc.), indexing/searching (e.g. mu), etc.
  - phyzome 8y ago
    I agree, websites are the wrong tool. What I'm envisioning is a desktop or phone app where you author posts and comments and read other people's posts and comments. The information is stored locally, but published out via a dumb server, with end-to-end encryption. Essentially, the server becomes an async dumb pipe (can just use WebDAV for this) or optionally a synchronous dumb pipe (if you add in a streaming protocol for notifications, such as websockets). The software could also push up a static website made of any public posts, I suppose. :-) I feel quite strongly that most users would benefit from their own device being the system of record for their posts, with the server functioning as coordination point and secondarily as an emergency backup. (I'll be posting in more detail about this if you follow my blog's feed.)
    - chriswarbo 8y ago
      Ah, when you said "private" I thought you meant something that wouldn't be shared with anyone (e.g. a personal diary). You're right that some other solution would be better for "private but shared" content (although it would likely be tricky w.r.t. both security and psychological/social aspects like getting people to follow good practices to prevent leaks).
      - phyzome 8y ago
        Oops, yes, that was definitely less than clear. :-)
- genezeta 8y ago
  I use a wiki (Dokuwiki in particular). Some parts are public, some parts are private, and some parts are public but unlisted. Not perfect, but it works for me.
ebiester 8y ago
I'm on board with that, but we haven't solved the problem of notifying the world of our content. Places like reddit discourage posting your own material. HN is fine for niche but places like medium cross-promote between authors so things are more likely to be discovered.
- mavhc 8y ago
  https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started#Syndicate_Elsewhere https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started#Syndicate_Elsewhere What if there was a reddit, but designed like a Planet Blog aggregator. Comments would go back to your own site, but the ranking in the list would be based on votes.
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  But medium has a terrible commenting system that makes no logical sense, and a full page blocking advert. Wish people wouldn't use medium.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
I agree that individual blogs that emit an RSS feed to follow are a great thing. However, most bloggers don’t really have the skills to host their own blog on a dedicated server. So, even if they did avoid Tumblr, they would be relying on another such hosting service like Blogspot or Wordpress.com.
- CM30 8y ago
  It isn't that hard to install a blog on a shared hosting plan or VPS somewhere. Just find something with CPanel and some sort of auto installer (I think it was called Fantastico or something) and Bob's your uncle. Don't even need to know how FTP works or how to code anything to do that...
  - 21 8y ago
    And who maintains that when something inevitably goes wrong?
    - habi 8y ago
      You yourself :) WordPress isn't that hard to administer/maintain.
      - jaxtellerSoA 8y ago
        No, your right. It is just one of the biggest targets for hackers, and has a litany of vulnerabilities that grows daily. If playing an endless game of whack-a-mole trying to keep up with the a constant stream of vulnerabilities seems fun, then sure. Personally I wouldn't touch WordPress with a 10-foot pole. I would consider something like Ghost instead. https://ghost.org/developers/ https://ghost.org/developers/
        JoshMnem 8y ago
        Or https://wp.com/ https://wp.com/ for a simple, hosted version of WordPress.
geofft 8y ago
Is there a good way to get my blog onto the fediverse? It sort of seems like the protocol (ActivityPub) is built in a way that it can support blog-style content as well as toot-style content, and it would solve many of the problems people have with discoverability, RSS dying, shared private posts, etc. I'd be interested in getting my blog (which is self-hosted and using a static site generator) publishing in a way that fediverse users can follow. I guess IndieWeb is also in this space, but ActivityPub probably has the critical mass thanks to Mastodon.
- eridius 8y ago
  I don't know about the Fediverse but you could look into micro.blog, which is focused on microblogging but supports longer-form content (long-form content shows up in a micro.blog feed as the title plus a link to the full post). micro.blog is part of IndieWeb.
  - geofft 8y ago
    "The fediverse" seems to be the name people are using to refer to the maxclique of federated Mastodon and Mastodon-compatible (Pleroma, etc.) instances. Mastodon uses ActivityPub as its server-to-server protocol, although it adds some features or at least conventions that I think are not in core ActivityPub (content warnings, emoji, usernames of the form @geofft@xoxo.zone instead of https://xoxo.zone/@geofft https://xoxo.zone/@geofft, etc.). But I think that it's possible for any Mastodon user to subscribe to something that's just publishing blog posts via ActivityPub and not actually acting like a Mastodon server, and posts will show up in their timeline. (Mostly I'm interested because in practice I tweet about my blog posts after I publish them and this seems to be how discovery works, so I might as well make my blog participate in the same protocol as this Twitter-replacement everyone seems excited about.)
    - ChainOfFools 8y ago
      somewhat unrelated but I've never heard the portmanteau maxclique for maximal clique before, and I'm going to steal it.
- 8y ago
CM30 8y ago
Yeah. The only way things will really move forward (in terms of privacy, freedom of speech and general quality of discourse) is if people host their own stuff rather than relying on a bunch of large corporations aiming only to improve their own metrics and save their own sorry reputations.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism. Savvy individuals could manage it themselves, by creating their own servers and encrypting the traffic and only granting access to trusted individuals. Most people, though, would have a hard time navigating that. A centralized (or perhaps semi-centralized, a la Mastodon) could help a lot on that front. Perhaps something comparable to Google+'s Circles concept. I always thought that was a great idea which was unfortunately rendered completely unworkable by the unfortunate accident that it was implemented by Google.
  - teddyh 8y ago
    > Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism. You’re forgetting that they also currently monitor everything everyone is reading, not just writing.
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      That's always the problem. Minds that aren't aware of this become more predictable. Until they are aware of this. I still have to personally hold onto the belief that no one mind is ever intrisincally more strong than any other mind. That's the belief assumed to be axiomatic and foundational for all the studying of minds people do. If I can predict how I believe you will think, I assume I'm mentally stronger, but that stuff is not something anyone can hold onto as a certainty. At least that's my belief, my own faith, my own boundary I believe in that must not be violated. Trying to intentionally control how people think is extremely violent, to me. Just because it doesn't look violent, doesn't mean it's not.
nickjj 8y ago
That's what I've been doing for the last few years (approaching 200 posts) and highly recommend it.

phyzome 8y ago

I have such nostalgia for the blogosphere. The one thing it's missing is post privacy; I want to be able to journal privately (like on Dreamwidth) but also use my own hosting and not rely on someone else's platform. I've been toying around with writing my own social media software along those lines, using servers. Some noodling about on that topic: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/ https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/

bena 8y ago
That doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle.
drharby 8y ago
I figure any cms could offer that via privileges
- phyzome 8y ago
  Sure! And that's what Dreamwidth offers... except I can't run my own DW. (Well, it's open source so I could, but it's kind of huge, and I would be the only user!) I'm basically thinking of federated DW.
  - stevenicr 8y ago
    self hosted wordpress does all this out of the box I think. I have one site where I have public posts and pages and some pages are "password protected" - so they are viewable by a select few associates, and a few pages are either saved as draft or pulished privately in the admin backedn / dashboard - which makes it easy to retrieve and edit and such. There are free plugins like buddypress wihch can make more complex systems, private, public, semi-private groups for friends and content, stuff like that. Many others like s2member and such. only trickery is if you have a widget displaying a list of published "pages" on your site, you may need to get into that widget and tell it to not display page 10398 if that is one you are trying to keep under wraps and yet be available for your secret friends, published, but not listed as another comment mentions with docuwiki, and I think youtube has a similar option. there are many auto backup options with basic free plugins too, so I think WP would cover what you are describing. Definitely need added security plugins as these are auto targetted for breaking into regularly, good ones are free and available. You could always put it in a sub folder and add in an htaccess extra htpasswd to lock it down further and such of course as well.
chriswarbo 8y ago
This doesn't sound like a use-case for a Web site to me. How about sending yourself emails, categorised into their own maildir or IMAP folder, or even a brand new account? That would inherit security from your email setup (which is monotonically more secure than systems which delegate password resetting to your email account). You can read and write them online or offline using a variety of readers and editors, including some self-hosted browser-based clients (e.g. RoundCube, etc.). You also get a bunch of tooling for free, e.g. for backups (offlineimap, isync, etc.), indexing/searching (e.g. mu), etc.
- phyzome 8y ago
  I agree, websites are the wrong tool. What I'm envisioning is a desktop or phone app where you author posts and comments and read other people's posts and comments. The information is stored locally, but published out via a dumb server, with end-to-end encryption. Essentially, the server becomes an async dumb pipe (can just use WebDAV for this) or optionally a synchronous dumb pipe (if you add in a streaming protocol for notifications, such as websockets). The software could also push up a static website made of any public posts, I suppose. :-) I feel quite strongly that most users would benefit from their own device being the system of record for their posts, with the server functioning as coordination point and secondarily as an emergency backup. (I'll be posting in more detail about this if you follow my blog's feed.)
  - chriswarbo 8y ago
    Ah, when you said "private" I thought you meant something that wouldn't be shared with anyone (e.g. a personal diary). You're right that some other solution would be better for "private but shared" content (although it would likely be tricky w.r.t. both security and psychological/social aspects like getting people to follow good practices to prevent leaks).
    - phyzome 8y ago
      Oops, yes, that was definitely less than clear. :-)
genezeta 8y ago
I use a wiki (Dokuwiki in particular). Some parts are public, some parts are private, and some parts are public but unlisted. Not perfect, but it works for me.

ebiester 8y ago

I'm on board with that, but we haven't solved the problem of notifying the world of our content. Places like reddit discourage posting your own material. HN is fine for niche but places like medium cross-promote between authors so things are more likely to be discovered.

mavhc 8y ago
https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started#Syndicate_Elsewhere https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started#Syndicate_Elsewhere What if there was a reddit, but designed like a Planet Blog aggregator. Comments would go back to your own site, but the ranking in the list would be based on votes.
philliphaydon 8y ago
But medium has a terrible commenting system that makes no logical sense, and a full page blocking advert. Wish people wouldn't use medium.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago

I agree that individual blogs that emit an RSS feed to follow are a great thing. However, most bloggers don’t really have the skills to host their own blog on a dedicated server. So, even if they did avoid Tumblr, they would be relying on another such hosting service like Blogspot or Wordpress.com.

CM30 8y ago
It isn't that hard to install a blog on a shared hosting plan or VPS somewhere. Just find something with CPanel and some sort of auto installer (I think it was called Fantastico or something) and Bob's your uncle. Don't even need to know how FTP works or how to code anything to do that...
- 21 8y ago
  And who maintains that when something inevitably goes wrong?
  - habi 8y ago
    You yourself :) WordPress isn't that hard to administer/maintain.
    - jaxtellerSoA 8y ago
      No, your right. It is just one of the biggest targets for hackers, and has a litany of vulnerabilities that grows daily. If playing an endless game of whack-a-mole trying to keep up with the a constant stream of vulnerabilities seems fun, then sure. Personally I wouldn't touch WordPress with a 10-foot pole. I would consider something like Ghost instead. https://ghost.org/developers/ https://ghost.org/developers/
      - JoshMnem 8y ago
        Or https://wp.com/ https://wp.com/ for a simple, hosted version of WordPress.

geofft 8y ago

Is there a good way to get my blog onto the fediverse? It sort of seems like the protocol (ActivityPub) is built in a way that it can support blog-style content as well as toot-style content, and it would solve many of the problems people have with discoverability, RSS dying, shared private posts, etc. I'd be interested in getting my blog (which is self-hosted and using a static site generator) publishing in a way that fediverse users can follow. I guess IndieWeb is also in this space, but ActivityPub probably has the critical mass thanks to Mastodon.

eridius 8y ago
I don't know about the Fediverse but you could look into micro.blog, which is focused on microblogging but supports longer-form content (long-form content shows up in a micro.blog feed as the title plus a link to the full post). micro.blog is part of IndieWeb.
- geofft 8y ago
  "The fediverse" seems to be the name people are using to refer to the maxclique of federated Mastodon and Mastodon-compatible (Pleroma, etc.) instances. Mastodon uses ActivityPub as its server-to-server protocol, although it adds some features or at least conventions that I think are not in core ActivityPub (content warnings, emoji, usernames of the form @geofft@xoxo.zone instead of https://xoxo.zone/@geofft https://xoxo.zone/@geofft, etc.). But I think that it's possible for any Mastodon user to subscribe to something that's just publishing blog posts via ActivityPub and not actually acting like a Mastodon server, and posts will show up in their timeline. (Mostly I'm interested because in practice I tweet about my blog posts after I publish them and this seems to be how discovery works, so I might as well make my blog participate in the same protocol as this Twitter-replacement everyone seems excited about.)
  - ChainOfFools 8y ago
    somewhat unrelated but I've never heard the portmanteau maxclique for maximal clique before, and I'm going to steal it.
8y ago

CM30 8y ago

Yeah. The only way things will really move forward (in terms of privacy, freedom of speech and general quality of discourse) is if people host their own stuff rather than relying on a bunch of large corporations aiming only to improve their own metrics and save their own sorry reputations.

bunderbunder 8y ago
Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism. Savvy individuals could manage it themselves, by creating their own servers and encrypting the traffic and only granting access to trusted individuals. Most people, though, would have a hard time navigating that. A centralized (or perhaps semi-centralized, a la Mastodon) could help a lot on that front. Perhaps something comparable to Google+'s Circles concept. I always thought that was a great idea which was unfortunately rendered completely unworkable by the unfortunate accident that it was implemented by Google.
- teddyh 8y ago
  > Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism. You’re forgetting that they also currently monitor everything everyone is reading, not just writing.
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    That's always the problem. Minds that aren't aware of this become more predictable. Until they are aware of this. I still have to personally hold onto the belief that no one mind is ever intrisincally more strong than any other mind. That's the belief assumed to be axiomatic and foundational for all the studying of minds people do. If I can predict how I believe you will think, I assume I'm mentally stronger, but that stuff is not something anyone can hold onto as a certainty. At least that's my belief, my own faith, my own boundary I believe in that must not be violated. Trying to intentionally control how people think is extremely violent, to me. Just because it doesn't look violent, doesn't mean it's not.

nickjj 8y ago

That's what I've been doing for the last few years (approaching 200 posts) and highly recommend it.