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Except having a legitimate personal website is a challenge you can't automate away. Even if you managed to produce a rugged installer script for, say, Mastodon
by zanny 8y ago
Except having a legitimate personal website is a challenge you can't automate away. Even if you managed to produce a rugged installer script for, say, Mastodon so you can one click deploy a working instance you still need to somehow A. get a domain and B. host it somewhere that will stay online for others to use.
There is no real way to automate domain procurement.
Most people don't leave a PC they own all the time to run a website.
So you end up hosting it. But now its centralizing again. If everyone were hosting their own mastodon instances on the same cloud provider thats barely any different from that cloud provider being a Facebook with all the data access they have. Even with a federated site like that few simply have a computer to leave on all the time to have their own site, let alone asking your average person to setup dynamic dns records if they did.
The fundamental name system of the Internet is too manual to enable average people to have personal sites. And any solution involves centralization which defeats the exercise.
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoWha? I leave my PCs on for years at a time. Except for natural disasters (storms, cut power lines) they operate 24X365. A personal website is pretty straightforward. I think its pretty straightforward to host things yourself.
- LocalPCGuy 8y ago> I think its pretty straightforward to host things yourself. Said as a true developer who no longer realizes how hard some of the things we do are to the average person who can barely operate their computer or smart phone. Think of all the things you have to learn in order to host your own site. I still have to explain the basics of what a domain name is to potential freelance customers, and why they need hosting in order to have a website online. This is knowledge that is not common outside of the developer ecosystem.
- CodeCube 8y agolol ... this seems to be a theme today in several different threads. Literally anyone on this website should take their own behavior as the opposite of what they assume the average user can or will do.
- awad 8y agoI honestly can't with the HN crowd at times. The problem with a bubble is you often don't realize you're in one.
- krapp 8y agoIs the bandwidth on a typical home ISP connection really viable for serving a website, and don't most ISPs forbid customers running servers on their accounts?
- zanny 8y agoYou would only (in this example) need enough bandwidth to satisfy the traffic of your immediate friends and family you interact with online. Your IM client is already doing that.
- oblio 8y agoYou are not the average Joe.