5 ms·

The difficulty with the blogging ecosystem is the same challenge that many others face, which is that some very large companies don't want you to have your own

by ve55 6y ago

The difficulty with the blogging ecosystem is the same challenge that many others face, which is that some very large companies don't want you to have your own blog when you could instead be producing content to make (Twitter, Medium, Youtube, Facebook, etc) more valuable. Still, the level of control and decentralization with blogs remains appealing to many, luckily. While blogging isn't dead, being able to better discover individual places on the Internet is a great step. My vision of the Internet was always that everyone gets their own website, which could be a blog, or of course anything else, perhaps they want to host videos or music instead of text posts. Then there would be centralized directories as well as decentralized+federated networks and interlinking to help people navigate through all of this. Then you could have open protocols on how all of these things connect, but the huge benefit would be the level of control that users have, resilience to censorship, significantly more creative freedoms and so on. It would be nice if people were not obligated to use certain social networks to be able to have certain kinds of content viewed by others, since we all know if you want your video watched, you have to use Youtube, as an example.

aklemm 6y ago
Yes! The technology really seems basically complete now with the IndieWeb and Fediverse efforts. It’s down to a UX and service provider problem now.
- ve55 6y ago
  I see the largest problem as that you're basically competing with the social networking giants, and without a profit model or some other significant source of funds, how can you expect to take enough of their users to garner your own network effects? I'm reminded of that one xkcd about competing standards (https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png), where every platform wants to maximize their long-term user retention, so ends up being proprietary, and now we have thousands of different systems, apps, and websites, just for something as basic as chat. Not only is this inefficient and wasteful, I think it really hampers the Internet and developer creativity as a whole. It would be great if when you make a new app, you could just drag and drop 'chat' into it, and it would be the same chat protocols and systems that all the other apps use. If we can have donation-funded services as good as Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, maybe there is some way to do this eventually? One can only hope. Services like Mastodon and many others do at least seem impressive technically, even if they're lacking the userbase of their centralized alternatives.
  - aklemm 6y ago
    The value of this model has to be apparent to the user, and I believe that can happen. When that happens, then there’s money to be made off of hosting these sites and for premium providers. The lack of profit motive hasn’t stopped the development of the technology; that’s gone very well as open source and standards development. There is profit to be made in packaging this up and selling to people who realize ~$100/yr is well worth it for a coherent, permanent, flexible home on the web without all the manipulation of the big platforms.
    - ve55 6y ago
      That's a good point, and we can already see sizeable portions of normal users that voice concerns about Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc. But how many of these users would really be willing (and able) to pay $100/year? I worry that any platform that succeeds enough will eventually fall into the same negative patterns that we dislike about the current prevailing platforms. Advertising will increase as advertisers realize there is money to be made, censorship will increase as governments realize freedom of speech has become an absolute and copyright laws are not being enforced, and so on in many other ways. The promise of decentralization is to solve these problems, but can they all truly be solved with code alone?
      - fossuser 6y ago
        I think Matrix/Riot is an example of a successful approach, and when p2p matrix is ready the complexity should be largely invisible to the user (and it also won't require paying for any hosting since the server is embedded in the client).
    - fossuser 6y ago
      Urbit attempts to solve this by making the default state a server on your own machines that’s p2p. If done right you get ad free applications where users own their own data by default without the complexity overhead of server management. The complexity can be invisible to the user (eventually) since the UI would basically just be using local applications that plug into your Urbit node.
- WJW 6y ago
  > It’s down to a UX and service provider problem now. UX and service providing (including marketing) is 99% of the problem when competing against twitter/facebook/etc though. The technology for self-hosting has existed for a very long time, but most people are about as interested in hosting their own mastodon server as they are in setting up their own wordpress instance or nginx install.
  - aklemm 6y ago
    Not the technology for self-hosting, the technology for a decentralized, federate Web. That hasn’t been feature-complete for very long at all. And of course it’s the prerequisite for good UX and services.
    - WJW 6y ago
      I know older tech isn't as cool as the fediverse and friends but DNS and web servers have enabled decentralised blog hosting for a very long time now. The parent comment by ve55 mentioned "My vision of the Internet was always that everyone gets their own website, which could be a blog, or of course anything else" and that vision has been possible for quite a while.
snisarenko 6y ago
Yep, I agree with this idea. Aggregators and directories should be separate services from the actual blogs, content. If you don't like the censorship/curation on one aggregator, you can go to a different one. I started working a little bit on this idea, by creating simple aggregators for mastodon and pixelfed (still thinking about how to improve the discovery/curation aspect) https://pixelfed.club https://pixelfed.club https://mastodonia.club https://mastodonia.club
- asaibx 6y ago
  This is great. Thanks so much for creating this! There is actually an amazing amount of really good quality content out there, but as everybody on this thread has pointed out already, discoverability is a major issue. I often wonder how one would go about finding a site like the one you made if it hadn't been posted here, though I suppose "aggregator" is actually a decent search keyword that should (in theory) also lead to other good content. Presumably "blog aggregator" wouldn't be a particularly useful search term though.
- Ambroisie 6y ago
  Aren't those services already self-aggregating? The whole point of federated instances is that they exchange and sync their content, or am I wrong?
  - snisarenko 6y ago
    They are. I created these for several reasons. - Reduce friction for unregistered users to see content. - The instance you use, only aggregates from specific instances of their choosing. You might miss content from other instances. - Work on custom curation / discovery features in the future.
- thinkloop 6y ago
  All that's missing now is a ranking mechanism and commenting system.
airstrike 6y ago
> My vision of the Internet was always that everyone gets their own website, which could be a blog, or of course anything else, perhaps they want to host videos or music instead of text posts. Then there would be centralized directories as well as decentralized+federated networks and interlinking to help people navigate through all of this. Then you could have open protocols on how all of these things connect, but the huge benefit would be the level of control that users have, resilience to censorship, significantly more creative freedoms and so on. So, Geocities? I agree, let's bring that back
- msla 6y ago
  > So, Geocities? Geocities was still hosted by a single company. Is that your point? Are you missing something or am I?
  - airstrike 6y ago
    > Geocities was still hosted by a single company. Because it was forever ago, but nothing about it required it to be hosted by a single company, so you could still replicate it today through federated distribution
- jerrysievert 6y ago
  > So, Geocities? I agree, let's bring that back I'm pretty sure that kyledrake already accomplished that the best way it's going to be accomplished with neocities. part of what the grandparent described reminds me more of webrings, perhaps more contextualized, along with the more centralized link aggregators. I think that ultimately the internet got too large and complex for the latter, and possibly too large for the former. which leaves us with conclaves: * "the dark web" * facebook * medium * slack/discord (community oriented, not work oriented) * reddit * and in its own way, hn curation seems to have been replaced with algorithms and machine learning, but the scale has forced it.
fossuser 6y ago
This is one reason I’m pretty excited about Urbit and have been playing around with their OS1 release. A from first principles design of personal servers where that complexity can eventually be invisible to the user. Applications made on their OS are decentralized by default and the identity model helps prevent spam. I think it’s pretty cool, and I haven’t been as excited about playing with something since I first started playing with Linux.
jseliger 6y ago
I submitted jakeseliger.com and yet I also find it comedic that the solution to too little independent Internet simultaneously runs through the corporate behemoth that is Reddit.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I view that as a temporary thing to “ship” now using the most widely available tool. I think once there’s a community we can figure out the way to do it in a truly independent ad-free way eventually. Right now I think a subreddit is the most accessible/best place to do this kind of thing for the most people to participate.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> The difficulty with the blogging ecosystem is the same challenge that many others face, which is that some very large companies don't want you to have your own blog when you could instead be producing content to make (Twitter, Medium, Youtube, Facebook, etc) more valuable. I'm not following. So they don't want you to blog on your own site instead of theirs. What are they going to do about it? Why does that make for a difficulty in the blogging ecosystem?
- someguyorother 6y ago
  They can cut features like RSS support and thus make it more of an effort for readers to follow your blog.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
The difficulty with the blogging ecosystem is the same challenge that many others face, which is that some very large companies don't want you to have your own blog when you could instead be producing content to make I don't really think that's it. I think it's just that you learn the names of the big companies because they are big. It's kind of like saying "Walmart doesn't want the world to have mom and pop shops. That's why you never hear about them." Well, Walmart has a history of undermining the success of local businesses, but I don't really think that's a goal per se. The existence of Walmart is not why a billion people don't know the name of some mom and pop shop in my small town. They don't know it because it's a mom and pop shop. If it were a multinational corporation, it wouldn't be a corner store anymore. I hope this reddit does well. I have subscribed and posted a thing, which is my attempt to support it, fwiw. It's nice to have some kind of aggregator, but I think blogging just has inherent challenges and there's no plot to kill them off just because the internet moved on and they stopped being as readily discoverable as they once were back when the internet was young and there was less competition and whatever.
- sverhagen 6y ago
  > "Walmart doesn't want the world to have mom and pop shops. ... That may not be their stated goal (or it may be, I don't know). But aren't corporate structures pushing them to continuously grow? Can they truly bring new money into the economy, or will their growth be at the expense of another company's revenue? Maybe on Monday, they pull one over on another big chain, on Tuesday, they end up hurting a mom and pop shop. > make (Twitter, Medium, Youtube, Facebook, etc) more valuable These companies may also not have a stated goal of destroying the distributed blogging ecosystem (or maybe they do), but wouldn't them driving for their own growth not have the same (potential) result? Isn't this the same thing Uber does to taxis? Amazon to book stores? (Oh, wow, the Amazon example hits close to the Walmart example, now doesn't it?)
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I do a lot of blogging and some of my blog posts have made the front page of Hacker News. And I'm enormously frustrated that they seem to not get shared by anyone but me on any other social media platforms and I'm enormously frustrated by what looks to me like classism, sexism, etc holding me back. This is a problem space I have thought a lot about and I don't agree with you. Frankly, I am not sure I can make use of r/hnblogs. I've suggested the moderator of it should determine a posting frequency that's acceptable and was told they don't expect to need such a guideline and I have no desire to become the de facto "test case" trying to determine what the word "occasionally" means to them and end up banned and blah blah blah. I don't need more drama. My expectation is the very platform under discussion here intended to solve this problem probably won't solve my problem. And I halfway expect to write a blog post somewhere detailing why this is likely to be drama waiting to happen for me no matter how I handle it. So while my life generally makes me feel like spitting nails, I sincerely do not agree with your world view that everyone is simply up to something nefarious all the time. I've met a few people like that in my life, but most people honest to god aren't intentionally shitting all over me. Most don't even realize that their rules or expectations or whatever end up being problematic for me personally while often I am, theoretically, the exact kind of person they are supposedly hoping to solve a problem for.
ethn 6y ago
I'm working on this with https://intrgr.com https://intrgr.com In the current form, blog posts are recommended to others based on their reading interests. I can add the rss feeds of any blogs you like to the global pool of articles. Just place them in a reply.

by ve55 6y ago

aklemm 6y ago

Yes! The technology really seems basically complete now with the IndieWeb and Fediverse efforts. It’s down to a UX and service provider problem now.

ve55 6y ago
I see the largest problem as that you're basically competing with the social networking giants, and without a profit model or some other significant source of funds, how can you expect to take enough of their users to garner your own network effects? I'm reminded of that one xkcd about competing standards (https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png), where every platform wants to maximize their long-term user retention, so ends up being proprietary, and now we have thousands of different systems, apps, and websites, just for something as basic as chat. Not only is this inefficient and wasteful, I think it really hampers the Internet and developer creativity as a whole. It would be great if when you make a new app, you could just drag and drop 'chat' into it, and it would be the same chat protocols and systems that all the other apps use. If we can have donation-funded services as good as Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, maybe there is some way to do this eventually? One can only hope. Services like Mastodon and many others do at least seem impressive technically, even if they're lacking the userbase of their centralized alternatives.
- aklemm 6y ago
  The value of this model has to be apparent to the user, and I believe that can happen. When that happens, then there’s money to be made off of hosting these sites and for premium providers. The lack of profit motive hasn’t stopped the development of the technology; that’s gone very well as open source and standards development. There is profit to be made in packaging this up and selling to people who realize ~$100/yr is well worth it for a coherent, permanent, flexible home on the web without all the manipulation of the big platforms.
  - ve55 6y ago
    That's a good point, and we can already see sizeable portions of normal users that voice concerns about Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc. But how many of these users would really be willing (and able) to pay $100/year? I worry that any platform that succeeds enough will eventually fall into the same negative patterns that we dislike about the current prevailing platforms. Advertising will increase as advertisers realize there is money to be made, censorship will increase as governments realize freedom of speech has become an absolute and copyright laws are not being enforced, and so on in many other ways. The promise of decentralization is to solve these problems, but can they all truly be solved with code alone?
    - fossuser 6y ago
      I think Matrix/Riot is an example of a successful approach, and when p2p matrix is ready the complexity should be largely invisible to the user (and it also won't require paying for any hosting since the server is embedded in the client).
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Urbit attempts to solve this by making the default state a server on your own machines that’s p2p. If done right you get ad free applications where users own their own data by default without the complexity overhead of server management. The complexity can be invisible to the user (eventually) since the UI would basically just be using local applications that plug into your Urbit node.
WJW 6y ago
> It’s down to a UX and service provider problem now. UX and service providing (including marketing) is 99% of the problem when competing against twitter/facebook/etc though. The technology for self-hosting has existed for a very long time, but most people are about as interested in hosting their own mastodon server as they are in setting up their own wordpress instance or nginx install.
- aklemm 6y ago
  Not the technology for self-hosting, the technology for a decentralized, federate Web. That hasn’t been feature-complete for very long at all. And of course it’s the prerequisite for good UX and services.
  - WJW 6y ago
    I know older tech isn't as cool as the fediverse and friends but DNS and web servers have enabled decentralised blog hosting for a very long time now. The parent comment by ve55 mentioned "My vision of the Internet was always that everyone gets their own website, which could be a blog, or of course anything else" and that vision has been possible for quite a while.

snisarenko 6y ago

Yep, I agree with this idea. Aggregators and directories should be separate services from the actual blogs, content. If you don't like the censorship/curation on one aggregator, you can go to a different one. I started working a little bit on this idea, by creating simple aggregators for mastodon and pixelfed (still thinking about how to improve the discovery/curation aspect) https://pixelfed.club https://pixelfed.club https://mastodonia.club https://mastodonia.club

asaibx 6y ago
This is great. Thanks so much for creating this! There is actually an amazing amount of really good quality content out there, but as everybody on this thread has pointed out already, discoverability is a major issue. I often wonder how one would go about finding a site like the one you made if it hadn't been posted here, though I suppose "aggregator" is actually a decent search keyword that should (in theory) also lead to other good content. Presumably "blog aggregator" wouldn't be a particularly useful search term though.
Ambroisie 6y ago
Aren't those services already self-aggregating? The whole point of federated instances is that they exchange and sync their content, or am I wrong?
- snisarenko 6y ago
  They are. I created these for several reasons. - Reduce friction for unregistered users to see content. - The instance you use, only aggregates from specific instances of their choosing. You might miss content from other instances. - Work on custom curation / discovery features in the future.
thinkloop 6y ago
All that's missing now is a ranking mechanism and commenting system.

airstrike 6y ago

> My vision of the Internet was always that everyone gets their own website, which could be a blog, or of course anything else, perhaps they want to host videos or music instead of text posts. Then there would be centralized directories as well as decentralized+federated networks and interlinking to help people navigate through all of this. Then you could have open protocols on how all of these things connect, but the huge benefit would be the level of control that users have, resilience to censorship, significantly more creative freedoms and so on. So, Geocities? I agree, let's bring that back

msla 6y ago
> So, Geocities? Geocities was still hosted by a single company. Is that your point? Are you missing something or am I?
- airstrike 6y ago
  > Geocities was still hosted by a single company. Because it was forever ago, but nothing about it required it to be hosted by a single company, so you could still replicate it today through federated distribution
jerrysievert 6y ago
> So, Geocities? I agree, let's bring that back I'm pretty sure that kyledrake already accomplished that the best way it's going to be accomplished with neocities. part of what the grandparent described reminds me more of webrings, perhaps more contextualized, along with the more centralized link aggregators. I think that ultimately the internet got too large and complex for the latter, and possibly too large for the former. which leaves us with conclaves: * "the dark web" * facebook * medium * slack/discord (community oriented, not work oriented) * reddit * and in its own way, hn curation seems to have been replaced with algorithms and machine learning, but the scale has forced it.

fossuser 6y ago

This is one reason I’m pretty excited about Urbit and have been playing around with their OS1 release. A from first principles design of personal servers where that complexity can eventually be invisible to the user. Applications made on their OS are decentralized by default and the identity model helps prevent spam. I think it’s pretty cool, and I haven’t been as excited about playing with something since I first started playing with Linux.

jseliger 6y ago

I submitted jakeseliger.com and yet I also find it comedic that the solution to too little independent Internet simultaneously runs through the corporate behemoth that is Reddit.

fossuser 6y ago
I view that as a temporary thing to “ship” now using the most widely available tool. I think once there’s a community we can figure out the way to do it in a truly independent ad-free way eventually. Right now I think a subreddit is the most accessible/best place to do this kind of thing for the most people to participate.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> The difficulty with the blogging ecosystem is the same challenge that many others face, which is that some very large companies don't want you to have your own blog when you could instead be producing content to make (Twitter, Medium, Youtube, Facebook, etc) more valuable. I'm not following. So they don't want you to blog on your own site instead of theirs. What are they going to do about it? Why does that make for a difficulty in the blogging ecosystem?

someguyorother 6y ago
They can cut features like RSS support and thus make it more of an effort for readers to follow your blog.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

The difficulty with the blogging ecosystem is the same challenge that many others face, which is that some very large companies don't want you to have your own blog when you could instead be producing content to make I don't really think that's it. I think it's just that you learn the names of the big companies because they are big. It's kind of like saying "Walmart doesn't want the world to have mom and pop shops. That's why you never hear about them." Well, Walmart has a history of undermining the success of local businesses, but I don't really think that's a goal per se. The existence of Walmart is not why a billion people don't know the name of some mom and pop shop in my small town. They don't know it because it's a mom and pop shop. If it were a multinational corporation, it wouldn't be a corner store anymore. I hope this reddit does well. I have subscribed and posted a thing, which is my attempt to support it, fwiw. It's nice to have some kind of aggregator, but I think blogging just has inherent challenges and there's no plot to kill them off just because the internet moved on and they stopped being as readily discoverable as they once were back when the internet was young and there was less competition and whatever.

sverhagen 6y ago
> "Walmart doesn't want the world to have mom and pop shops. ... That may not be their stated goal (or it may be, I don't know). But aren't corporate structures pushing them to continuously grow? Can they truly bring new money into the economy, or will their growth be at the expense of another company's revenue? Maybe on Monday, they pull one over on another big chain, on Tuesday, they end up hurting a mom and pop shop. > make (Twitter, Medium, Youtube, Facebook, etc) more valuable These companies may also not have a stated goal of destroying the distributed blogging ecosystem (or maybe they do), but wouldn't them driving for their own growth not have the same (potential) result? Isn't this the same thing Uber does to taxis? Amazon to book stores? (Oh, wow, the Amazon example hits close to the Walmart example, now doesn't it?)
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I do a lot of blogging and some of my blog posts have made the front page of Hacker News. And I'm enormously frustrated that they seem to not get shared by anyone but me on any other social media platforms and I'm enormously frustrated by what looks to me like classism, sexism, etc holding me back. This is a problem space I have thought a lot about and I don't agree with you. Frankly, I am not sure I can make use of r/hnblogs. I've suggested the moderator of it should determine a posting frequency that's acceptable and was told they don't expect to need such a guideline and I have no desire to become the de facto "test case" trying to determine what the word "occasionally" means to them and end up banned and blah blah blah. I don't need more drama. My expectation is the very platform under discussion here intended to solve this problem probably won't solve my problem. And I halfway expect to write a blog post somewhere detailing why this is likely to be drama waiting to happen for me no matter how I handle it. So while my life generally makes me feel like spitting nails, I sincerely do not agree with your world view that everyone is simply up to something nefarious all the time. I've met a few people like that in my life, but most people honest to god aren't intentionally shitting all over me. Most don't even realize that their rules or expectations or whatever end up being problematic for me personally while often I am, theoretically, the exact kind of person they are supposedly hoping to solve a problem for.

ethn 6y ago

I'm working on this with https://intrgr.com https://intrgr.com In the current form, blog posts are recommended to others based on their reading interests. I can add the rss feeds of any blogs you like to the global pool of articles. Just place them in a reply.