14 ms·

If you want to be in control, the solution has always been the same: own your own domain, and post there. If you post on someone else's domain, then it's their

If you want to be in control, the solution has always been the same: own your own domain, and post there. If you post on someone else's domain, then it's their content, and they're in control of it, not you. No matter what is claimed otherwise. Yes, it's harder. Getting visibility is also harder. It's still the only solution if you want to be in control. It's okay to pay someone to run the blogging platform, etc., as long as you own the domain name & can decide what it points to. You can then switch providers, switch systems you use, or whatever you want to do. But if you don't control the domain name, someone else is in control.

quickthrower2 6y ago
Good advice, but this rant is about the tool not the domain ownership though. You can own your own domain and use Wordpress self-hosted, then find they updated the UI constantly as you upgrade it keep it up to date for - you know - security. The only way to get the level of control long term is probably sadly a static site generation kind of a thing. There was a HN post about "software that is no longer changed but still used" as I am paraphrasing and this is an interesting idea. A GUI blogging platform that ends it's life and stays as-is forever would be cool, even if it lack funky features, maybe you enter the HTML yourself.
- dwheeler 6y ago
  I agree, you can own your own domain name without having to do everything yourself. Like anything else, if you don't want to do something, hire somebody else to do it. I own my own domain name, and then pay others to take care of my website. I chose a cheap one for now. If I don't like their service, I can move my content somewhere else in the future. I could even have it hosted for free on GitHub, if I'm willing to live with him there constraints on static servers. But I own the domain name, so no one can just take it down without any recourse. If someone decides to stop providing me a service, I can just take my stuff somewhere else. Of course, you have to have a backup of the data, and use tools that are available elsewhere. But that really isn't that difficult. Static sites are really easy to manage this way. If you want something beyond the static site, it's not hard to use tools like WordPress which are open source software and widely available elsewhere. (Be cautious about adding plugins to Wordpress, some of them are security disasters, but at least you get to choose what you use.)
jhatemyjob 6y ago
If you want your services to be in control of you, self-host everything. That way all of your weekends and nights are for updating to FreeBSD 14 and debugging why postgres can't write to disk anymore oh wait I need to buy more storage and migrate everything
- pcx 6y ago
  I don't agree. There are a lot of services which provide fully managed platforms with multiple competent providers you can migrate between. WordPress + CPanel does a great job at this, I've seen barely technical folks manage multiple websites and blogs,export and restore backups, migrate between providers. And this was all 10years back.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    > And this was all 10years back. Thankfully, we've tossed all that old stuff out and simplified things with Docker and k8s.
    - rektide 6y ago
      Gonna suck for a while yes but long run there are real reasons for this jump from little daemons installed on to hosts to cloud native.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - throwawaynothx 6y ago
      "simplified" things with Docker and k8s.. if you are using docker for anything other than microservices and development environments you are doing it wrong.
      - judge2020 6y ago
        Containerd then? Containers predate docker in the form of VMs, the only difference being optimizations with not having to run another entire OS kernel to get software running in the exact same state on many machines in just a few seconds.
pier25 6y ago
I'm working on a blogging platform which of course allows you to add your custom domain(s). Another feature we have is being able to add any URL you like to your posts or even redirects to the "main URL". So for example if you migrate from WP and some post had this URL: domain.com/posts/123 You could use that as your main URL, or use it with a redirect to a new URL such as: domain.com/hello-world We're also working on a feature to be able to download all your content in a .zip file with HTML files, markdown files, and images. Are there other features you'd like to have to feel "in control"?
- Abhinav2000 6y ago
  Stylesheets or having many themes would be nice. I find a lot of blogging / hosting platforms work well out of the box but are a pain to customise. In the end I just did my own github pages, with good ol fashioned html and css that I manually coded
  - pier25 6y ago
    We will have themes with settings. We would like to support custom themes but certainly not at launch. It would probably make more sense to work as a headless CMS so you can plug it into your SSG of choice and have total control.
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  > We're also working on a feature to be able to download all your content in a .zip file with HTML files, markdown files, and images. Can you go to another instance of the platform, upload your zip backup, and restore everything? I've had that feature on my blog for years[0], and backup/restore feature has come in handy so many times, from setting up a dev environment to outright saving my bacon. [0] https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet Example backup: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HUkiovCL-lRZa7DTc1JVPhDGxxuLQpWm/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HUkiovCL-lRZa7DTc1JVPhDGxxu...
  - pier25 6y ago
chongli 6y ago
This issue is why I’m skeptical of SaaS in general. I look at software as a solution to a problem. When I have a problem and software solves it, I’m happy. The better the software, the more thoroughly it solves my problem without creating new problems for me (by being annoying or inefficient). The best software seems to hit a sweet spot with the right set of features targeted at solving a particular problem or small class of problems with minimal fuss. Really good software becomes extremely difficult to improve on. But services can’t deal with just hitting the sweet spot and calling it a day. They need to grow, which means they need to evolve. The constant cash flow seems to burn a hole in the manager’s pocket. Eventually they cross a threshold and exit the sweet spot. Maybe they release a major version with an awful new UI. Like a TV series which has gone on too long, they jump the shark [1]. Perhaps this problem of SaaS may be analogous to network decay [2], though the latter is more gradual. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JumpingTheShark https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JumpingTheShark [2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  While I share the frustration with the constant need to fiddle with things, I am not sure if going a non-SaaS route is gonna solve this problem completely. Pay-once software at least has a clearer incentive to deliver improvements, so that you want to pay for the newer versions. So the need to grow might be even stronger. Ultimately old versions will also go out of support. Maybe OSS is the best bet, as long as the project is popular enough.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    SaaS software on the other hand is more popular since the revenue stream is forcefully consistent no matter if you're putting out 10 features in a quarter or 1, or if the customer even wants to pay for whatever new feature the SaaS is putting out. With pay-once software, your revenue stream will fluctuate more depending on if you're putting out features everyone wants or not, which is great as a consumer (assuming your needs match with other customers) but could lead to huge financial issues (read: layoffs) if someone makes the wrong decision and develops features for 2 quarters in a row that no existing customer upgrades for.
YetAnotherNick 6y ago
I don't think sites like blogspot and medium says it is their content. Also, on the flip side I know that most of the self hosted sites dies in 5 years. You can say that it is their fault, but statistically speaking I would pretty much assume that the site will die. Thirdly, self hosting is not that easy. Even most developers do not have complete knowledge of things like server management, security, migration, networking etc. let alone other users. > You can then switch providers, switch systems you use, or whatever you want to do. Switching from say blogspot to medium is much more easier than even switching between two regions of AWS. Switching cloud provider is tough.
- martin_a 6y ago
  > Even most developers do not have complete knowledge of things like server management, security, migration, networking etc. let alone other users. You don't need to! Managed Hosting is cheap as it can get! 2 €/month will get you 25 GB of web storage + 25 GB of mail storage, a .de domain (in my case at least), SSL through "Let's Encrypt", PHP, MySQL, 100 mailboxes, full control over the DNS records and whatnot else. For 3 €/month you get three times of that. Hosting is really dirt cheap and competent people will take care of all the messy stuff you don't know about.
  - mkl 6y ago
    What provider do you use?
    - martin_a 6y ago
      Right now I'm going with netcup.de for normal hosting, but I got some vServer cloud whateverthingies running with hetzner.de (they also have managed hosting for < 2 €/month) for a PiHole and tinkering. I've been a happy customer of all-inkl.com for like 10 years or so, mainly switched to netcup because they were cheaper. But all-inkl is great for business, 24/7 phone support and you talk to REAL people and technicians call you back for no extra cost and things like that.
  - pnutjam 6y ago
glaberficken 6y ago
Like you said, get your own domain. But crucially get a good unique pseudonym before you start. Don't get your own name, unless it is really unique. Your pseudonym should meet 2 criteria: 1) There shouldn't already be any obvious search engine results associated with it 2) It should be unique and easy enough for the common person to recall (aim at least to be recalled when you see the name on a list of multiple names but ultimately to be recalled from fuzzy memory directly or by means of searching for a key word)
- dingaling 6y ago
  3) it should be unambiguous to spell verbally. Avoid cute mis-spellings and often-confused letters such as m and n
Funes- 6y ago
>If you post on someone else's domain, then it's their content, and they're in control of it, not you. No matter what is claimed otherwise. Likewise, if you are paying for hosting and a domain to any corporation, they effectively control your published content. Isn't that so? A hosting company can remove your account; a domain registrar can ban you, too. Isn't that what had been happening to Gab? The only way you can be in full control of your own content is publishing a hidden service on Tor, an eepsite on I2P, a site on ZeroNet--provided you use it with Tor--, etcetera. Sure, it's availability at the expense of visibility, but that's how it is right now.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  Yes, but if you have the content and maybe even a static site generated by Hugo or something on a computer you control, it doesn't take more than few minutes to deploy the whole site to a new host and transfer the domain to point to the new address.
  - Funes- 6y ago
    What if your content is deemed too controversial or "problematic"? Will any company host it? Any domain registrar? Many topics now considered unpublishable weren't, not that long ago. And that's a slippery slope I wouldn't dare to test. The free flow of information must prevail if we want to preserve our freedom. I don't think anyone's capacity to publish anything online should rely on trust nor gatekeepers.
    - tasogare 6y ago
      Consider hosting in a country less politicized on the said issues. I think for example you could host most traditional views without the any issue in Japan, for three reasons: freedeom of speech is guaranteed by constitution, they likely won’t bother with foreign language and the said views are mainstream here. Given how the problem of free expression is becoming in the West, there is a business opportunity on medium-term I think.
    - M2Ys4U 6y ago

quickthrower2 6y ago

Good advice, but this rant is about the tool not the domain ownership though. You can own your own domain and use Wordpress self-hosted, then find they updated the UI constantly as you upgrade it keep it up to date for - you know - security. The only way to get the level of control long term is probably sadly a static site generation kind of a thing. There was a HN post about "software that is no longer changed but still used" as I am paraphrasing and this is an interesting idea. A GUI blogging platform that ends it's life and stays as-is forever would be cool, even if it lack funky features, maybe you enter the HTML yourself.

dwheeler 6y ago
I agree, you can own your own domain name without having to do everything yourself. Like anything else, if you don't want to do something, hire somebody else to do it. I own my own domain name, and then pay others to take care of my website. I chose a cheap one for now. If I don't like their service, I can move my content somewhere else in the future. I could even have it hosted for free on GitHub, if I'm willing to live with him there constraints on static servers. But I own the domain name, so no one can just take it down without any recourse. If someone decides to stop providing me a service, I can just take my stuff somewhere else. Of course, you have to have a backup of the data, and use tools that are available elsewhere. But that really isn't that difficult. Static sites are really easy to manage this way. If you want something beyond the static site, it's not hard to use tools like WordPress which are open source software and widely available elsewhere. (Be cautious about adding plugins to Wordpress, some of them are security disasters, but at least you get to choose what you use.)

jhatemyjob 6y ago

If you want your services to be in control of you, self-host everything. That way all of your weekends and nights are for updating to FreeBSD 14 and debugging why postgres can't write to disk anymore oh wait I need to buy more storage and migrate everything

pcx 6y ago
I don't agree. There are a lot of services which provide fully managed platforms with multiple competent providers you can migrate between. WordPress + CPanel does a great job at this, I've seen barely technical folks manage multiple websites and blogs,export and restore backups, migrate between providers. And this was all 10years back.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  > And this was all 10years back. Thankfully, we've tossed all that old stuff out and simplified things with Docker and k8s.
  - rektide 6y ago
    Gonna suck for a while yes but long run there are real reasons for this jump from little daemons installed on to hosts to cloud native.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - throwawaynothx 6y ago
    "simplified" things with Docker and k8s.. if you are using docker for anything other than microservices and development environments you are doing it wrong.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      Containerd then? Containers predate docker in the form of VMs, the only difference being optimizations with not having to run another entire OS kernel to get software running in the exact same state on many machines in just a few seconds.

pier25 6y ago

I'm working on a blogging platform which of course allows you to add your custom domain(s). Another feature we have is being able to add any URL you like to your posts or even redirects to the "main URL". So for example if you migrate from WP and some post had this URL: domain.com/posts/123 You could use that as your main URL, or use it with a redirect to a new URL such as: domain.com/hello-world We're also working on a feature to be able to download all your content in a .zip file with HTML files, markdown files, and images. Are there other features you'd like to have to feel "in control"?

Abhinav2000 6y ago
Stylesheets or having many themes would be nice. I find a lot of blogging / hosting platforms work well out of the box but are a pain to customise. In the end I just did my own github pages, with good ol fashioned html and css that I manually coded
- pier25 6y ago
  We will have themes with settings. We would like to support custom themes but certainly not at launch. It would probably make more sense to work as a headless CMS so you can plug it into your SSG of choice and have total control.
theandrewbailey 6y ago
> We're also working on a feature to be able to download all your content in a .zip file with HTML files, markdown files, and images. Can you go to another instance of the platform, upload your zip backup, and restore everything? I've had that feature on my blog for years[0], and backup/restore feature has come in handy so many times, from setting up a dev environment to outright saving my bacon. [0] https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet Example backup: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HUkiovCL-lRZa7DTc1JVPhDGxxuLQpWm/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HUkiovCL-lRZa7DTc1JVPhDGxxu...
- pier25 6y ago

chongli 6y ago

This issue is why I’m skeptical of SaaS in general. I look at software as a solution to a problem. When I have a problem and software solves it, I’m happy. The better the software, the more thoroughly it solves my problem without creating new problems for me (by being annoying or inefficient). The best software seems to hit a sweet spot with the right set of features targeted at solving a particular problem or small class of problems with minimal fuss. Really good software becomes extremely difficult to improve on. But services can’t deal with just hitting the sweet spot and calling it a day. They need to grow, which means they need to evolve. The constant cash flow seems to burn a hole in the manager’s pocket. Eventually they cross a threshold and exit the sweet spot. Maybe they release a major version with an awful new UI. Like a TV series which has gone on too long, they jump the shark [1]. Perhaps this problem of SaaS may be analogous to network decay [2], though the latter is more gradual. [1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JumpingTheShark https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JumpingTheShark [2] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay

ajmurmann 6y ago
While I share the frustration with the constant need to fiddle with things, I am not sure if going a non-SaaS route is gonna solve this problem completely. Pay-once software at least has a clearer incentive to deliver improvements, so that you want to pay for the newer versions. So the need to grow might be even stronger. Ultimately old versions will also go out of support. Maybe OSS is the best bet, as long as the project is popular enough.
- judge2020 6y ago
  SaaS software on the other hand is more popular since the revenue stream is forcefully consistent no matter if you're putting out 10 features in a quarter or 1, or if the customer even wants to pay for whatever new feature the SaaS is putting out. With pay-once software, your revenue stream will fluctuate more depending on if you're putting out features everyone wants or not, which is great as a consumer (assuming your needs match with other customers) but could lead to huge financial issues (read: layoffs) if someone makes the wrong decision and develops features for 2 quarters in a row that no existing customer upgrades for.

YetAnotherNick 6y ago

I don't think sites like blogspot and medium says it is their content. Also, on the flip side I know that most of the self hosted sites dies in 5 years. You can say that it is their fault, but statistically speaking I would pretty much assume that the site will die. Thirdly, self hosting is not that easy. Even most developers do not have complete knowledge of things like server management, security, migration, networking etc. let alone other users. > You can then switch providers, switch systems you use, or whatever you want to do. Switching from say blogspot to medium is much more easier than even switching between two regions of AWS. Switching cloud provider is tough.

martin_a 6y ago
> Even most developers do not have complete knowledge of things like server management, security, migration, networking etc. let alone other users. You don't need to! Managed Hosting is cheap as it can get! 2 €/month will get you 25 GB of web storage + 25 GB of mail storage, a .de domain (in my case at least), SSL through "Let's Encrypt", PHP, MySQL, 100 mailboxes, full control over the DNS records and whatnot else. For 3 €/month you get three times of that. Hosting is really dirt cheap and competent people will take care of all the messy stuff you don't know about.
- mkl 6y ago
  What provider do you use?
  - martin_a 6y ago
    Right now I'm going with netcup.de for normal hosting, but I got some vServer cloud whateverthingies running with hetzner.de (they also have managed hosting for < 2 €/month) for a PiHole and tinkering. I've been a happy customer of all-inkl.com for like 10 years or so, mainly switched to netcup because they were cheaper. But all-inkl is great for business, 24/7 phone support and you talk to REAL people and technicians call you back for no extra cost and things like that.
- pnutjam 6y ago

glaberficken 6y ago

Like you said, get your own domain. But crucially get a good unique pseudonym before you start. Don't get your own name, unless it is really unique. Your pseudonym should meet 2 criteria: 1) There shouldn't already be any obvious search engine results associated with it 2) It should be unique and easy enough for the common person to recall (aim at least to be recalled when you see the name on a list of multiple names but ultimately to be recalled from fuzzy memory directly or by means of searching for a key word)

dingaling 6y ago
3) it should be unambiguous to spell verbally. Avoid cute mis-spellings and often-confused letters such as m and n

Funes- 6y ago

>If you post on someone else's domain, then it's their content, and they're in control of it, not you. No matter what is claimed otherwise. Likewise, if you are paying for hosting and a domain to any corporation, they effectively control your published content. Isn't that so? A hosting company can remove your account; a domain registrar can ban you, too. Isn't that what had been happening to Gab? The only way you can be in full control of your own content is publishing a hidden service on Tor, an eepsite on I2P, a site on ZeroNet--provided you use it with Tor--, etcetera. Sure, it's availability at the expense of visibility, but that's how it is right now.

theshrike79 6y ago
Yes, but if you have the content and maybe even a static site generated by Hugo or something on a computer you control, it doesn't take more than few minutes to deploy the whole site to a new host and transfer the domain to point to the new address.
- Funes- 6y ago
  What if your content is deemed too controversial or "problematic"? Will any company host it? Any domain registrar? Many topics now considered unpublishable weren't, not that long ago. And that's a slippery slope I wouldn't dare to test. The free flow of information must prevail if we want to preserve our freedom. I don't think anyone's capacity to publish anything online should rely on trust nor gatekeepers.
  - tasogare 6y ago
    Consider hosting in a country less politicized on the said issues. I think for example you could host most traditional views without the any issue in Japan, for three reasons: freedeom of speech is guaranteed by constitution, they likely won’t bother with foreign language and the said views are mainstream here. Given how the problem of free expression is becoming in the West, there is a business opportunity on medium-term I think.
  - M2Ys4U 6y ago