3 ms·

There is just a problem with self curated content in general. There used to be a lot of experts making their own sites with information that was never available

There is just a problem with self curated content in general. There used to be a lot of experts making their own sites with information that was never available before. It was easy to just upload some HTML files somewhere. Now this information is being put in inaccessible areas like Facebook Groups. Then people tried running their own sites with wordpress and stuff but that becomes hard as you are usually on a crappy shared host, and get hacked the minute an exploit comes out. As technologists, I think we could help by making it easier for people to publish to the open web with just plain HTML. Static site generators like Hugo go a long way there. CDNs like cloudfront are cheap now so no servers needed. We should make it easy for people by having something that can do it all for them. Get a domain, CDN, and SSL cert then a simple local editing tool and one button publish.

dmortin 6y ago
> Now this information is being put in inaccessible areas like Facebook Groups. I hate that Facebook groups hide a lot of info this way. Back then google found blog posts and forum posts about a particular subject. Now if they are in a closed facebook group (is this the default?) then google won't see it. I don't know if google indexes public facebook groups.
- specialp 6y ago
  I'd suspect not. I sometimes will get a FB result for businesses (with nagging box for me to join Facebook taking up 33% of the screen). I Google a lot of stuff and never get results for FB groups public or private as a non Facebook user.
hagy 6y ago
I agree and have personally found it quite easy to setup small websites hosted on AWS using Route53, Certificate Manager, S3, and CloudFront. They cost nearly nothing at low scale and are quite cost efficient until you hit serious scale, which few personal website ever achieve. Yet, I don't think most people are going to want to go this route and it would take a fair amount of tooling to automate everything. It's not sufficient to just abstract away the cloud provider, people also need tools for creating and managing content. In theory you could run such tools locally, but I think most people would expect a web interface similar to that provided by Wordpress and medium. Further, there's a big difference between free and essentially zero cost. How many people are going to be motivated to pull out their credit card to create blog when free alternatives already exist? Not only are existing blogging sites free, but they also promise the opportunity to actually make money through their affiliate program if the site becomes popular.
- folmar 6y ago
  The layman has blogger/wordpress.com for free and one-click wordpress installer at any hosting provider of choice, so the tooling is a done thing (mostly Softaculous now but it's not a monopoly).
5986043handy 6y ago
The huge leap would be to try to make all of that simple and accessible to non-technical people without making it bloated like Wordpress.
heavyset_go 6y ago
What are these Facebook Groups with expert content?

dmortin 6y ago

> Now this information is being put in inaccessible areas like Facebook Groups. I hate that Facebook groups hide a lot of info this way. Back then google found blog posts and forum posts about a particular subject. Now if they are in a closed facebook group (is this the default?) then google won't see it. I don't know if google indexes public facebook groups.

specialp 6y ago
I'd suspect not. I sometimes will get a FB result for businesses (with nagging box for me to join Facebook taking up 33% of the screen). I Google a lot of stuff and never get results for FB groups public or private as a non Facebook user.

hagy 6y ago

I agree and have personally found it quite easy to setup small websites hosted on AWS using Route53, Certificate Manager, S3, and CloudFront. They cost nearly nothing at low scale and are quite cost efficient until you hit serious scale, which few personal website ever achieve. Yet, I don't think most people are going to want to go this route and it would take a fair amount of tooling to automate everything. It's not sufficient to just abstract away the cloud provider, people also need tools for creating and managing content. In theory you could run such tools locally, but I think most people would expect a web interface similar to that provided by Wordpress and medium. Further, there's a big difference between free and essentially zero cost. How many people are going to be motivated to pull out their credit card to create blog when free alternatives already exist? Not only are existing blogging sites free, but they also promise the opportunity to actually make money through their affiliate program if the site becomes popular.

folmar 6y ago
The layman has blogger/wordpress.com for free and one-click wordpress installer at any hosting provider of choice, so the tooling is a done thing (mostly Softaculous now but it's not a monopoly).

5986043handy 6y ago

The huge leap would be to try to make all of that simple and accessible to non-technical people without making it bloated like Wordpress.

heavyset_go 6y ago

What are these Facebook Groups with expert content?