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I just used blacklight with my own site and found a perfect score. My site costs me essentially nothing* to host (netlify and aws serverless technologies that

I just used blacklight with my own site and found a perfect score. My site costs me essentially nothing* to host (netlify and aws serverless technologies that are mostly under the free tier). *My highest cost so far was when I was debugging serverless websockets and had a bug in my code that caused constant messages between the browser clients I was testing (which I left open for a day when I started work). That cost me $7 dollars. I have my own service-hosted playground using little more than git and a few cli tools. We need to rebuild the ad-free web.

jka 6y ago
It's a bit of a tangent, but you might be interested in this solar-powered website if you haven't seen it before: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html
prionassembly 6y ago
I have the feeling that you're fluent in web technologies. Even Terry Tao uses wordpress.com. Life is short, and not everyone enjoys building their own houses or tuning their own cars.
- ricksharp 6y ago
  wordpress.com is often used by internet marketers because it has loads of tools for that and content management. But that doesn't mean it has to include all the tracking plugins. Also, there are plenty of site builders like wix.com, squarespace, etc. that can launch a site in minutes. Using those tools doesn't necessarily imply ads or tracking. (But I would agree it would be impossible to know for most uses if it did have tracking in the background.) And yes, I wrote my first web page in the 90s, but that doesn't mean we don't have nicer tools that anyone can use now. (Wow, I'm trying to remember how I figured that out as a teenager. I think my dial-up isp had a tool on their website and instructions for creating a path and uploading your own web files.)
  - cosmojg 6y ago
    Just a heads up: sites built with Wix and Squarespace come with tracking by default, even if you don't use it, and it's impossible to disable.
kylegill 6y ago
I suspected (perhaps like you) that this article was going to be about free hosting providers (Netlify and the likes). When I saw it was Disqus/Facebook/Twitter I wasn't too surprised. I also host a lot of projects "for free" (TM) on Netlify, Firebase, etc. and don't tend to include any 3rd party scripts. It makes me wonder if some form of data (anonymous or not) scraped from folks like Netlify is slated to be sold off to advertisers or SaaS products looking to find customers. As they do things like process your HTML they could pull out textual content looking for signals.
- yawnxyz 6y ago
  Yeah I was wondering if this was about maybe Cloudflare or Vercel getting lots of user / usage analytics off of freely hosted sites... doesn't seem like that's what they're doing, but who knows? Now where did I put my tin foil hat...
  - brnt 6y ago
    Cloudflare freely admits they use traffic data across clients for DDOS analysis. Which seems like a good tradeoff to me. Not even really a tradeoff.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
Amazing how blacklight gives it a perfect score when, in reality, IP addresses, domains, SSL certificates and other traffic metadata are clearly visible to AWS. Not only the data can be subpoenaed, but it's also being intercepted by the usual 3-letter agencies. If you care about user privacy find a smaller hosting in a country with good data protection. Even better, host the site in somebody's home in that country. And keep in mind that this is still not enough.
- ricksharp 6y ago
  Good enough for what? My site is just a blog with a bunch of prototypes and games. My goal is an ad-free Internet. If the client is worried about surveillance then it would be up to them to use an appropriate vpn - but if a three letter agency cares about who reads my blog, I‘ll probably have a lot more problems then a visitor.
rs999gti 6y ago
> We need to rebuild the ad-free web. Agree but how do you pay for? Will it be a government owned, taxpayer funded free internet?
- rightbyte 6y ago
  The hosts should pay. If one has something to say one can host it. Hosting a small website yourself cost peanuts and simple websites should cover most non commercial use. The walled gardens are killing the independent small scale websites. Facebook and Reddit essentially are eating every community site and those doesn't make much admoney anyway.
  - ricksharp 6y ago
    Exactly. I’ll pay to host my own content - but if it’s just static content - that’s essentially zero. Also, I’ll make tools to make it easy for anyone to create their own self-hosted website. No ads needed. And if I make a product or service of value, I’ll sell it - without ads. Word of mouth recommendations are great. Somebody can make a review or a blog post about it because they like it. Others can find it when they search for it - because they need it. Think about it - how many things/services do you buy because you saw an ad versus because you had a need and sought out the best product that could fulfill it. In fact, I think it would be awesome if a new search engine could step up - ad free web search (excludes any website that uses ads).
    - rightbyte 6y ago
      The big problem I believe is discoverability. People use Google's algorithmically culled search which favors big sites and SEO spam. Earlier there was a logistic with web rings and link-lists. They are pretty much gone. I mean since the phone book where I live is not printed anymore I can't look up what companies operate plumbing or pizza in my area because there are no such lists anymore. I can find a few on Google. Google pretty much put the information collect and arrange business out of business and didn't replace it. "The information age" should really be called "the age of colored noise".
sally1620 6y ago
you can serve ads without mining users data. I am old enough to remember an Internet were ads were relevant to the content.
- ricksharp 6y ago
  I remember an internet without ads. We had alot of "in construction" gifs though :)
  - GekkePrutser 6y ago
    And marquees. How I hated those!
    - ricksharp 6y ago
      I'm just going to leave this here: http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/ http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/

jka 6y ago

It's a bit of a tangent, but you might be interested in this solar-powered website if you haven't seen it before: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html

prionassembly 6y ago

I have the feeling that you're fluent in web technologies. Even Terry Tao uses wordpress.com. Life is short, and not everyone enjoys building their own houses or tuning their own cars.

ricksharp 6y ago
wordpress.com is often used by internet marketers because it has loads of tools for that and content management. But that doesn't mean it has to include all the tracking plugins. Also, there are plenty of site builders like wix.com, squarespace, etc. that can launch a site in minutes. Using those tools doesn't necessarily imply ads or tracking. (But I would agree it would be impossible to know for most uses if it did have tracking in the background.) And yes, I wrote my first web page in the 90s, but that doesn't mean we don't have nicer tools that anyone can use now. (Wow, I'm trying to remember how I figured that out as a teenager. I think my dial-up isp had a tool on their website and instructions for creating a path and uploading your own web files.)
- cosmojg 6y ago
  Just a heads up: sites built with Wix and Squarespace come with tracking by default, even if you don't use it, and it's impossible to disable.

kylegill 6y ago

I suspected (perhaps like you) that this article was going to be about free hosting providers (Netlify and the likes). When I saw it was Disqus/Facebook/Twitter I wasn't too surprised. I also host a lot of projects "for free" (TM) on Netlify, Firebase, etc. and don't tend to include any 3rd party scripts. It makes me wonder if some form of data (anonymous or not) scraped from folks like Netlify is slated to be sold off to advertisers or SaaS products looking to find customers. As they do things like process your HTML they could pull out textual content looking for signals.

yawnxyz 6y ago
Yeah I was wondering if this was about maybe Cloudflare or Vercel getting lots of user / usage analytics off of freely hosted sites... doesn't seem like that's what they're doing, but who knows? Now where did I put my tin foil hat...
- brnt 6y ago
  Cloudflare freely admits they use traffic data across clients for DDOS analysis. Which seems like a good tradeoff to me. Not even really a tradeoff.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

Amazing how blacklight gives it a perfect score when, in reality, IP addresses, domains, SSL certificates and other traffic metadata are clearly visible to AWS. Not only the data can be subpoenaed, but it's also being intercepted by the usual 3-letter agencies. If you care about user privacy find a smaller hosting in a country with good data protection. Even better, host the site in somebody's home in that country. And keep in mind that this is still not enough.

ricksharp 6y ago
Good enough for what? My site is just a blog with a bunch of prototypes and games. My goal is an ad-free Internet. If the client is worried about surveillance then it would be up to them to use an appropriate vpn - but if a three letter agency cares about who reads my blog, I‘ll probably have a lot more problems then a visitor.

rs999gti 6y ago

> We need to rebuild the ad-free web. Agree but how do you pay for? Will it be a government owned, taxpayer funded free internet?

rightbyte 6y ago
The hosts should pay. If one has something to say one can host it. Hosting a small website yourself cost peanuts and simple websites should cover most non commercial use. The walled gardens are killing the independent small scale websites. Facebook and Reddit essentially are eating every community site and those doesn't make much admoney anyway.
- ricksharp 6y ago
  Exactly. I’ll pay to host my own content - but if it’s just static content - that’s essentially zero. Also, I’ll make tools to make it easy for anyone to create their own self-hosted website. No ads needed. And if I make a product or service of value, I’ll sell it - without ads. Word of mouth recommendations are great. Somebody can make a review or a blog post about it because they like it. Others can find it when they search for it - because they need it. Think about it - how many things/services do you buy because you saw an ad versus because you had a need and sought out the best product that could fulfill it. In fact, I think it would be awesome if a new search engine could step up - ad free web search (excludes any website that uses ads).
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    The big problem I believe is discoverability. People use Google's algorithmically culled search which favors big sites and SEO spam. Earlier there was a logistic with web rings and link-lists. They are pretty much gone. I mean since the phone book where I live is not printed anymore I can't look up what companies operate plumbing or pizza in my area because there are no such lists anymore. I can find a few on Google. Google pretty much put the information collect and arrange business out of business and didn't replace it. "The information age" should really be called "the age of colored noise".

sally1620 6y ago

you can serve ads without mining users data. I am old enough to remember an Internet were ads were relevant to the content.

ricksharp 6y ago
I remember an internet without ads. We had alot of "in construction" gifs though :)
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  And marquees. How I hated those!
  - ricksharp 6y ago
    I'm just going to leave this here: http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/ http://www.themostamazingwebsiteontheinternet.com/