14 ms·

I don't think it's any harder to create a website than it ever was. The problem seems to be that corporations have made it so easy to do it within their silos t

by zrm 6y ago

I don't think it's any harder to create a website than it ever was. The problem seems to be that corporations have made it so easy to do it within their silos that people aren't willing to spend ten hours on something they could do in ten minutes, not realizing that they're going to spend a lot more than ten hours creating content which the company will then vaporize at random whenever they feel like it.

quaintdev 6y ago
A decade ago, there use to be celebrity websites which had forums, galleries, blogs now it's just Instagram. Hell so many prominent celebrities don't even own a domain name in their name. Also, it's not like the content has improved. Earlier their use to be HQ images in those celeb galleries now the highest resolution image is 1200x1200. The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions everything else has gone downhill with respect to discussions, forums, galleries, blogs. Most of these are replaced by poor comments section. It's not just celebrities, so many independent artists are putting up their talent on Instagram and I don't have access to any of it because I need an Instagram account for that. Instagram web version is forcing to sign up if you scroll 1 page down on a profile. Sometimes I feel like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications that will burn these walled gardens to the ground. /rant
- r3trohack3r 6y ago
  The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions From Wikipedia: Celebrity is a reference to the fame and wide public recognition of an individual or a group I'd posit that celebrities are celebrities by connecting with millions. A platform that offers a "celebrity" the ability to connect easily with millions seems to be worth more than a list of any other features.
  - zeckalpha 6y ago
    What has changed is the meaning of the word connected.
- MYEUHD 6y ago
  >I don't have access to any of it because I need an Instagram account for that. Check out https://bibliogram.art https://bibliogram.art
  - JoblessWonder 6y ago
    502 Bad Gateway
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      Old link. Here ya go https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
      - aspenmayer 6y ago
        For what it’s worth, the original link is back up again.
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
- _jal 6y ago
  > like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications Yes, please! More and faster. Centralized services are easy to build, because they offer an obvious location to do some of the things that are tricky to do in a distributed fashion. They are also, by the way, far easier to for small numbers of coordinating people to control, which makes them popular with corporations, authoritarians and sociopaths. Decentralized services will rarely be the New Shiny that attracts all the 14 year olds for a few minutes. But, unlike email, you never hear anyone whining that Myspace won't go away.
  - freehunter 6y ago
    We have tons of decentralized platforms. The amount is not the problem. The problem is the user experience. For users who don’t care about anything behind the scenes and only cares about the experience, why would they go out of their way to figure out Mastodon when Facebook has a one-step signup process? The reason central platforms win is because they have to be dead simple to use in order to attract any users. Decentralized platforms get their initial users because of how cool the technology is, but those people (people like me and you) aren’t UX experts and don’t prioritize UX. It has to be easier than the central platform, and the central platform has the benefit of millions/billions of dollars to throw at it. Which means the decentralized platforms have to work even harder to overcome that. It’s not impossible, but it does require engineers to overcome their desire to build cool things and instead focusing on building a user experience that’s better than what Facebook/Twitter/etc can provide.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      Joining a Mastodon server is just as simple as signing up to Facebook. The difference is that no single Mastodon instance has centralized control over their users; you always get the option of signing up elsewhere, or using your own instance.
      - freehunter 6y ago
        It’s the “signing up elsewhere or using your own instance” that’s the problem. You’re joining a Mastodon server and if you want to go to another server you have to actually move things. It takes actual effort. It seems like the Mastodon developers look at email and think “if it works for email it’ll work here” and don’t understand that people deal with email because they have to, not because they want to. I don’t want to have to change my email address when I switch providers and I don’t want to have to move all my stuff if my favorite Mastodon server decides to shut down. That’s not a solution that’s just another problem. It’s bad user experience.
- justaguyhere 6y ago
  If celebrities (with their fame, reach and money) can't bother owning their own domains, what chance does a normal guy/gal have? It would be trivial for celebrities to set up their own websites and share whatever stuff they are sharing. At minimum, they can do this in addition to whatever social media they are on. It is as if we are all becoming lazy and/or many of us don't realize the harm in giving all our info to half a dozen super mega corps. Most of these mega corps aren't even distributed in the world, they are all American (except tiktok) which is another interesting angle. This is going to happen (already happening?) in the webapps/apps world too. There are so many no-code tools popping up - most will die, the rest will get acquired by the mega corps. Made a great webapp that is successful? Now you are stuck with bubble/airtable/shopify/whatever. I cannot name many no-code tools that lets you export your application to be hosted independently. I feel like we are on a path where in a few decades, a dozen or two corporations will control every single aspect of our lives - online especially, and probably offline too.
  - skybrian 6y ago
    A lot of ordinary people don't post in public, or if they do it's not under their real name, and there is a growing trend of deleting it after a few days. They don't want you to have any data about them at all. The modern alternative to Usenet is private Facebook groups that never get indexed.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > If celebrities (with their fame, reach and money) can't bother owning their own domains, what chance does a normal guy/gal have? This is a matter of demand, not capability. It seems most celebs just don't care about setting up their own stuff, and, really, why would they? There are free platforms out there that give them huge amounts of reach. Most of these people just don't need their own website. They may come to regret that decision later, but it's their decision to make. If a normal guy/gal wants to set up their own domain and website, it's not hard for them to do so, certainly no harder than it was in the 90s/00s, and probably a lot easier. The "no-code" stuff certainly has lock-in disadvantages, but you can simply choose not to use them if you want. Yes, it's more work, but it was always more work to do it yourself, and always will be.
- Yhippa 6y ago
  Counterpoint: does the average internet user want to download a new app or go visit a different website each time they want to get these updates?
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    If the websites bother to export RSS/ATOM/ActivityPub feeds, they won't need to. They'll just "subscribe" to the stream in their preferred app/webservice, and get aggregated updates about everyone they care about.
    - smabie 6y ago
      Sure, but what about commenting on the post? No one likes creating accounts for different websites in order to post one comment. It's obvious that things like Twitter and Instagram provide value to celebrities and people who follow them. It's just that there are some serious externalities not factored in.
      - zozbot234 6y ago
        ActivityPub lets you mark a comment as a "reply" to a post (or any web resource), then all you need is a trackback-like facility to link from the post to comments on it. It doesn't need to be centralized.
        lmm 6y ago
        How do you despam that?
        eyelidlessness 6y ago
        Or de-nazi it for that matter?
- imhoguy 6y ago
  These celebrities will be forgotten as soon as their Instagram account is gone or followers appear to be dead accounts mostly. Some artistically influential will get to the mainstream thanks to their fans hoarding and sharing the data, like all these last century music/film stars who left tons of material in any medium, now digitized and shared/pirated. Although I get a bit worried about p2p sharing as multimedia rental walled gardens got too popular.
  - jychang 6y ago
    The venn diagram of "celebs who are influential" and "fans who are data hoarders" don't overlap as much as you think. The latter tend to be a much nerdier group than the general population.
    - imhoguy 6y ago
      Yeah, you may be right here. Also Instagram has low entry barrier, where super stars got enormous promotional budgets. Now it is full race to the bottom I would say, commoditization of popularity, massive celebritism :)
- LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
  There are many projects to make network decentralized such as ipfs (InterPlanetary File System). When exposing these services to public, legality is a big issue. Plenty of rights would involve in it (copyright, privacy, and so on). Also, all kind of crimes are another issue. It is hard for people to keep monitoring if contents are safe or not. I think we need a network version of the War of Independence.
clusterfish 6y ago
A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their content on Facebooks and Instagrams because those platforms are better for getting your content out to your followers and more people. They are being rational. Where's the non-proprietory decentralized platform that lets me reach as many people as I can on Facebook? There isn't one. Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way? Facebook is 16 years old. That was a lot of time to figure out an alternative solution, but all we have are experimental projects that rely on adoption that they don't have to be useful. Corporations aren't going to change how they behave, but it's annoying that us techies are apparently incapable of beating them at our own game.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  More often than not, the "game" trends toward market capture and acquire + kill or absorb business strategies. At a certain size that's hard for anyone to beat.
- zrm 6y ago
  > Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way? Newsfeed is RSS/Atom. Identity / friends / followers are really one package, and it isn't a thing browsers can solve on their own, because people want the ability to do password resets etc. Also, decentralized identity is somewhat the opposite of this anyway -- people don't want to use the same "identity" for their parents and their friends and their boss. The best way to do this is for sites to use email as identity, because it's common and gives you password resets, but people can create more than one and separate them as they like. Which the technology to do already exists, but Facebook and Google made it easy and the free software equivalent takes several hours to get running. Which we could fix, but haven't (yet).
  - clusterfish 6y ago
    Sure RSS exists, and I use it, but it's not even built-in to (most) browsers anymore. You open an RSS link in the browser and it spits out XML garbage. Wat. RSS is sadly not enough on its own without the other puzzle pieces. Private feeds are not really a thing, it doesn't let you comment on or like or share the article to your friends, etc.
mc32 6y ago
Yep, it’s even worse. There are some things that don’t have a definitive answer, like many aspects of CoViD. Some pages with what I would categorize as “inquiring” get removed just because they don’t line up with the WHO. This isn’t about questioning vaccines, but rather the unsettled questions around this new disease. Just gets banned... it’s not like I have a stake in that fight _other_ than dismay at private censorship of opinions that don’t toe a given line. It’s rather frightening. But... many of the same companies will fill your search results or fill affiliate pages with quackery ads just fine...
thayne 6y ago
I think that's only half of it. The other half is that it's easier for consumers to find content in the silos of the large corporations than content that exists outside of them.
6ak74rfy 6y ago
I went through exactly this thinking recently when I wanted to setup a blog for myself (and migrate an existing one off of WordPress). I tried my best (and I think I succeeded) in ensuring that I am not locked into one vendor, and it was pretty much free. Someone else mentioned that you can't reach as many people from your silo-ed website as you can if you go through social networks. I found one way you could get best of both worlds - through Medium's import feature[1]. But I don't yet know how effective that is. Here's a short write-up in case anyone's interested: [2] [1]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a-post https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a... [2]: https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/58-setup-blog-and-email-on-custom-domain-for-almost-free/ https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/58-setup-blog-and-email-on-cus...

by zrm 6y ago

quaintdev 6y ago

A decade ago, there use to be celebrity websites which had forums, galleries, blogs now it's just Instagram. Hell so many prominent celebrities don't even own a domain name in their name. Also, it's not like the content has improved. Earlier their use to be HQ images in those celeb galleries now the highest resolution image is 1200x1200. The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions everything else has gone downhill with respect to discussions, forums, galleries, blogs. Most of these are replaced by poor comments section. It's not just celebrities, so many independent artists are putting up their talent on Instagram and I don't have access to any of it because I need an Instagram account for that. Instagram web version is forcing to sign up if you scroll 1 page down on a profile. Sometimes I feel like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications that will burn these walled gardens to the ground. /rant

r3trohack3r 6y ago
The only thing that has improved is how easily a celebrity can reach millions From Wikipedia: Celebrity is a reference to the fame and wide public recognition of an individual or a group I'd posit that celebrities are celebrities by connecting with millions. A platform that offers a "celebrity" the ability to connect easily with millions seems to be worth more than a list of any other features.
- zeckalpha 6y ago
  What has changed is the meaning of the word connected.
MYEUHD 6y ago
>I don't have access to any of it because I need an Instagram account for that. Check out https://bibliogram.art https://bibliogram.art
- JoblessWonder 6y ago
  502 Bad Gateway
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    Old link. Here ya go https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      For what it’s worth, the original link is back up again.
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://github.com/cloudrac3r/bibliogram https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/ https://sr.ht/~cadence/bibliogram/
_jal 6y ago
> like we need to build cutting edge decentralized applications Yes, please! More and faster. Centralized services are easy to build, because they offer an obvious location to do some of the things that are tricky to do in a distributed fashion. They are also, by the way, far easier to for small numbers of coordinating people to control, which makes them popular with corporations, authoritarians and sociopaths. Decentralized services will rarely be the New Shiny that attracts all the 14 year olds for a few minutes. But, unlike email, you never hear anyone whining that Myspace won't go away.
- freehunter 6y ago
  We have tons of decentralized platforms. The amount is not the problem. The problem is the user experience. For users who don’t care about anything behind the scenes and only cares about the experience, why would they go out of their way to figure out Mastodon when Facebook has a one-step signup process? The reason central platforms win is because they have to be dead simple to use in order to attract any users. Decentralized platforms get their initial users because of how cool the technology is, but those people (people like me and you) aren’t UX experts and don’t prioritize UX. It has to be easier than the central platform, and the central platform has the benefit of millions/billions of dollars to throw at it. Which means the decentralized platforms have to work even harder to overcome that. It’s not impossible, but it does require engineers to overcome their desire to build cool things and instead focusing on building a user experience that’s better than what Facebook/Twitter/etc can provide.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Joining a Mastodon server is just as simple as signing up to Facebook. The difference is that no single Mastodon instance has centralized control over their users; you always get the option of signing up elsewhere, or using your own instance.
    - freehunter 6y ago
      It’s the “signing up elsewhere or using your own instance” that’s the problem. You’re joining a Mastodon server and if you want to go to another server you have to actually move things. It takes actual effort. It seems like the Mastodon developers look at email and think “if it works for email it’ll work here” and don’t understand that people deal with email because they have to, not because they want to. I don’t want to have to change my email address when I switch providers and I don’t want to have to move all my stuff if my favorite Mastodon server decides to shut down. That’s not a solution that’s just another problem. It’s bad user experience.
justaguyhere 6y ago
If celebrities (with their fame, reach and money) can't bother owning their own domains, what chance does a normal guy/gal have? It would be trivial for celebrities to set up their own websites and share whatever stuff they are sharing. At minimum, they can do this in addition to whatever social media they are on. It is as if we are all becoming lazy and/or many of us don't realize the harm in giving all our info to half a dozen super mega corps. Most of these mega corps aren't even distributed in the world, they are all American (except tiktok) which is another interesting angle. This is going to happen (already happening?) in the webapps/apps world too. There are so many no-code tools popping up - most will die, the rest will get acquired by the mega corps. Made a great webapp that is successful? Now you are stuck with bubble/airtable/shopify/whatever. I cannot name many no-code tools that lets you export your application to be hosted independently. I feel like we are on a path where in a few decades, a dozen or two corporations will control every single aspect of our lives - online especially, and probably offline too.
- skybrian 6y ago
  A lot of ordinary people don't post in public, or if they do it's not under their real name, and there is a growing trend of deleting it after a few days. They don't want you to have any data about them at all. The modern alternative to Usenet is private Facebook groups that never get indexed.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > If celebrities (with their fame, reach and money) can't bother owning their own domains, what chance does a normal guy/gal have? This is a matter of demand, not capability. It seems most celebs just don't care about setting up their own stuff, and, really, why would they? There are free platforms out there that give them huge amounts of reach. Most of these people just don't need their own website. They may come to regret that decision later, but it's their decision to make. If a normal guy/gal wants to set up their own domain and website, it's not hard for them to do so, certainly no harder than it was in the 90s/00s, and probably a lot easier. The "no-code" stuff certainly has lock-in disadvantages, but you can simply choose not to use them if you want. Yes, it's more work, but it was always more work to do it yourself, and always will be.
Yhippa 6y ago
Counterpoint: does the average internet user want to download a new app or go visit a different website each time they want to get these updates?
- zozbot234 6y ago
  If the websites bother to export RSS/ATOM/ActivityPub feeds, they won't need to. They'll just "subscribe" to the stream in their preferred app/webservice, and get aggregated updates about everyone they care about.
  - smabie 6y ago
    Sure, but what about commenting on the post? No one likes creating accounts for different websites in order to post one comment. It's obvious that things like Twitter and Instagram provide value to celebrities and people who follow them. It's just that there are some serious externalities not factored in.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      ActivityPub lets you mark a comment as a "reply" to a post (or any web resource), then all you need is a trackback-like facility to link from the post to comments on it. It doesn't need to be centralized.
      - lmm 6y ago
        How do you despam that?
        eyelidlessness 6y ago
        Or de-nazi it for that matter?
imhoguy 6y ago
These celebrities will be forgotten as soon as their Instagram account is gone or followers appear to be dead accounts mostly. Some artistically influential will get to the mainstream thanks to their fans hoarding and sharing the data, like all these last century music/film stars who left tons of material in any medium, now digitized and shared/pirated. Although I get a bit worried about p2p sharing as multimedia rental walled gardens got too popular.
- jychang 6y ago
  The venn diagram of "celebs who are influential" and "fans who are data hoarders" don't overlap as much as you think. The latter tend to be a much nerdier group than the general population.
  - imhoguy 6y ago
    Yeah, you may be right here. Also Instagram has low entry barrier, where super stars got enormous promotional budgets. Now it is full race to the bottom I would say, commoditization of popularity, massive celebritism :)
LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
There are many projects to make network decentralized such as ipfs (InterPlanetary File System). When exposing these services to public, legality is a big issue. Plenty of rights would involve in it (copyright, privacy, and so on). Also, all kind of crimes are another issue. It is hard for people to keep monitoring if contents are safe or not. I think we need a network version of the War of Independence.

clusterfish 6y ago

A lot of people, clubs and businesses publish their content on Facebooks and Instagrams because those platforms are better for getting your content out to your followers and more people. They are being rational. Where's the non-proprietory decentralized platform that lets me reach as many people as I can on Facebook? There isn't one. Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way? Facebook is 16 years old. That was a lot of time to figure out an alternative solution, but all we have are experimental projects that rely on adoption that they don't have to be useful. Corporations aren't going to change how they behave, but it's annoying that us techies are apparently incapable of beating them at our own game.

Avicebron 6y ago
More often than not, the "game" trends toward market capture and acquire + kill or absorb business strategies. At a certain size that's hard for anyone to beat.
zrm 6y ago
> Why aren't the social functionality of identity / friends / followers / newsfeed / etc. built into browsers in a standardized way? Newsfeed is RSS/Atom. Identity / friends / followers are really one package, and it isn't a thing browsers can solve on their own, because people want the ability to do password resets etc. Also, decentralized identity is somewhat the opposite of this anyway -- people don't want to use the same "identity" for their parents and their friends and their boss. The best way to do this is for sites to use email as identity, because it's common and gives you password resets, but people can create more than one and separate them as they like. Which the technology to do already exists, but Facebook and Google made it easy and the free software equivalent takes several hours to get running. Which we could fix, but haven't (yet).
- clusterfish 6y ago
  Sure RSS exists, and I use it, but it's not even built-in to (most) browsers anymore. You open an RSS link in the browser and it spits out XML garbage. Wat. RSS is sadly not enough on its own without the other puzzle pieces. Private feeds are not really a thing, it doesn't let you comment on or like or share the article to your friends, etc.

mc32 6y ago

Yep, it’s even worse. There are some things that don’t have a definitive answer, like many aspects of CoViD. Some pages with what I would categorize as “inquiring” get removed just because they don’t line up with the WHO. This isn’t about questioning vaccines, but rather the unsettled questions around this new disease. Just gets banned... it’s not like I have a stake in that fight _other_ than dismay at private censorship of opinions that don’t toe a given line. It’s rather frightening. But... many of the same companies will fill your search results or fill affiliate pages with quackery ads just fine...

thayne 6y ago

I think that's only half of it. The other half is that it's easier for consumers to find content in the silos of the large corporations than content that exists outside of them.

6ak74rfy 6y ago

I went through exactly this thinking recently when I wanted to setup a blog for myself (and migrate an existing one off of WordPress). I tried my best (and I think I succeeded) in ensuring that I am not locked into one vendor, and it was pretty much free. Someone else mentioned that you can't reach as many people from your silo-ed website as you can if you go through social networks. I found one way you could get best of both worlds - through Medium's import feature[1]. But I don't yet know how effective that is. Here's a short write-up in case anyone's interested: [2] [1]: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a-post https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/214550207-Import-a... [2]: https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/58-setup-blog-and-email-on-custom-domain-for-almost-free/ https://ketanvijayvargiya.com/58-setup-blog-and-email-on-cus...