14 ms·

Always Own Your Platform (2019)

322 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

dijit 4y ago
Previous (2019): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20145704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20145704
- phnofive 4y ago
  Off topic: this was posted and reposted four times in 2019 in a burst of three in March and two in June. The only one which hit was June 10, 2019. Well, as they say, second to last try is the charm.
mro_name 4y ago
http://IndieWeb.org/POSSE http://IndieWeb.org/POSSE to a rescue.
mawise 4y ago
Haven[1] is your own platform for publishing privately when you're not trying to "build an audience" [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org
- luckydenvermint 4y ago
  Interesting. How's that differ from PostHaven [1]? [1]: https://posthaven.com https://posthaven.com
  - mawise 4y ago
    Haven is about _private_ blogging as a social media alternative. Post privately, share with your friends/family, even expose your blog with authenticated RSS. The crypto world has co-opted the term "Decentralized", but in a non-crypto sense, Haven is what decentralized social media could look like. Happy to chat more (and apologies for not catching your question sooner). Feel free to message me on the haven contact page: https://havenweb.org/contact.html https://havenweb.org/contact.html
  - spidey1 4y ago
    Looks like havenweb can be self hosted and posthaven doesn’t offer that.
altdataseller 4y ago
Sounds cool in theory but almost impossible and impractical. For example, you can have a newsletter but google could decide your domain belongs in Spam forever. There goes that “owned platform”
- convolvatron 4y ago
  I don't think there is any fix for that except for people to deliberatively and incrementally take that power from their hands. not betting on the outcome. I guess the old real hope is that 15 years from now when google is finally no longer relevant, that smaller business and individuals diffuse that control more broadly. or we get google 2.0
- c2h5oh 4y ago
  Well, technically it's still an owned platform, just in this context it's a platform that got owned by google.
- gerdesj 4y ago
  From your comment you seem to think that Google somehow owns your arse. Perhaps you use them for your email and other functions and fail to see over the top of their walled garden? There is no doubt that Google largely own Search and several other functions but they really don't own the internet as a whole. Often we see sad articles on HN about how the monster in the room twats someone into oblivion thanks to a stupid "AI" making a judgement call that a human would be embarrassed about. To avoid or perhaps slightly mitigate that fate is well documented hereabouts and elsewhere. For what it is worth (in my experience) Google is not inimical on an arbitrary basis. They really don't decide anything - it's all algorithms, pixie dust and bollocks. Avoid that and you are golden. As it turns out, I've been able to run many "local" email systems and even my own little IT company quite happily for over two decades, without giving much thought to Google. We do have a newsletter email that we send out too. Some of my customers fly quite close to the edge of the spam/ham boundary. I operate in the UK. Bizarrely, I can quite happily run SMTP from a domestic FTTC connection here, with a little care.
  - sneak 4y ago
benoliver999 4y ago
Really hard for non-techies; even a hosted WordPress isn't easy to use. I've been asked a few times 'I want to write online, what do I do?' and it's hard to find easy to use answers that don't involve vendor lock-in. Or me having to provide support forever. SSGs with plain text files are brilliant once you are set up, but it's a big hurdle getting there. Best I can do is try to find platforms with sane exit strategies.
- azangru 4y ago
  > Really hard for non-techies Yes; but it’s not like even that many techies host their own content. I love how Jeremy Keith copies everything he tweets to his own site [0]. Wanted to check how he set it all up; but his site isn’t open-sourced. [0] - https://adactio.com https://adactio.com
  - al_borland 4y ago
    Looks like it's the other way around. He posts on his site and it syndicates to the other platforms. https://youtu.be/X3SrZuH00GQ?t=852 https://youtu.be/X3SrZuH00GQ?t=852
    - azangru 4y ago
      Even better! The true POSSE spirit!
- 3np 4y ago
  May be worth considering: Lightweight ActivityPub writing platform, straightforward to self-host but there are also managed hosts: https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/
- FalconSensei 4y ago
  > SSGs with plain text files are brilliant once you are set up, but it's a big hurdle getting there. Even in that case, not nearly as practical, unless you mostly do long-form and only post from your computer. Even with SSG set up, having to be on the computer to create a draft, or make a quick correction, is really a bother. Also, when you own everything, you end up spending more time tinkering with it, which is not bad per se if you are having fun, but terrible if your goal is to actually post. Those 2 things - harder to post and easier to get sidetracked - explains why so many SSG'd blogs are made up of a few posts explaining why and how it was set up, and maybe a couple actual posts.
azangru 4y ago
> Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube entice us to give them our creative work. It's time to take it back ... Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself. So, youtube, right? Where would you host your videos if you had a mind to take them back?
- dibujante 4y ago
  I would simply spend millions of dollars serving my own viral videos.
  - getcrunk 4y ago
    Well. I'd wager you can server your 1 viral video for max a few grand a month.
    - TranquilMarmot 4y ago
      Paid for by all the Google ads you run or money from Patreon haha
  - bin_bash 4y ago
    paid for with what, patreon?
- aqme28 4y ago
  > Google Yeah, stop letting Google dictate your search results! Create your own search engine and own your platform!
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    Ain't sure if you know this, but in case you don't, Google is a lot more than just a search engine nowadays.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
jlbbellefeuille 4y ago
The reason why you should own your own platform is called “platform risk”. https://www.startupillustrated.com/Archive/Platform-Risk/ https://www.startupillustrated.com/Archive/Platform-Risk/
digitallyfree 4y ago
In a perfect world, everyone would have their own servers in their homes or colos. Fiber would be cheaply avaliable everywhere, and everyone would have the know-how to manage their locally hosted services. In truth, it's quite a lot of work to manage and maintain. Now there are say Docker Wordpress images that can be set up in ten minutes on AWS. However part of self-hosting is that there's no technical support - you're on your own if something breaks, there are updates, etc. Whereas a managed service abstracts all that away, and thus is appealing to a mainstream audience. While we at HN may like the technical side of things, many creators are uninterested in spending hours debugging a performance issue and want to write/draw/etc. Personally I have servers in my basement and run a Matrix instance, OpenVPN, and a webserver (static site fronted by Cloudflare) as my publicly exposed services. I also have additional services like Landscape and network storage on LAN. When you run all those services, you don't just follow a guide, set it up, and leave it. While that may work for a couple months, something will break eventually and you'll have to scramble to fix it without understanding why. To do things properly and get good uptime you need to understand how things work, why they're configured that way, and have good backup and recovery practices. Security is also another factor, especially if you are storing private or confidential information. Also for creators, there are services like Youtube and Twitch which are pretty much impossible to replicate without massive cost and infrastructure. If you're just doing text and images, then you could use a VPS or a CDN fronted homeserver and operate your own website. I'm not a vtuber, but if I was it simply wouldn't be possible for me to run my own service even though I'm interested in this stuff. The only thing I really can recommend is to keep local copies of all your work on disk, properly backed up. Then at least if you lose access to the service, you can bootstrap again somewhere else.
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  I think users appreciate having a feed that combines everyone’s posts and algorithmically recommends the best ones, like youtube or twitter do. That can be solved with RSS now, but RSS doesn’t get you likes and replies etc. And they appreciate having usernames so they can say “check me out at @username”. You can solve that by making everyone buy a domain name, but we have zero infrastructure right now for letting people use their domain name as their username. The cryptocurrency community does seem at least halfway interested in solving these problems fwiw, but they do still have some major scaling problems to overcome.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
The issue is that you will always need some type of infrastructure to work. Maybe we need government investment in infrastructure. Having government infrastructure allows a lot of small businesses to work. Take for example the road system. There are so many business that depend on the roads. Imagine if they were all owned by private companies that could kick you off at their whim? The postal system also is very similar, though recently it has been getting less investment. One advantage of government infrastructure is that there are laws and rights such as due process/freedom of speech/etc. I am not sure what that would look like in practice for the digital world. One area that be useful is digital identity. Other people have mentioned it, but maybe having the Postal Service provide you with a secure identity card (similar to what Estonia provides). This would enable “social login” without being dependent on Google/Facebook/Apple/etc. The truth is owning your own platform is beyond what an individual developer or small (or even medium sized) company can do.
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
What's always blown my mind is the trend for businesses to fail to understand this. Building your entire company around AWS means a future competitor also already has full control of your company and access to your data. And I think the most hilarious example is Microsoft, a trillion-dollar level company which chose to hand over the entirety of the web (by switching to Chromium) and mobile (by abandoning WinMo for Android) and doesn't understand how they handed control of their entire business to their top competitor. The architects of those two decisions probably guaranteed the future collapse of Microsoft.
- wolpoli 4y ago
  Microsoft tried to continue to maintain their own browser for years without any market share to show for it. For whatever reason, the browser just couldn't match the level of polish in Google Chrome or Apple Safari. This current situation is stable for Microsoft - the fact that Microsoft is gaining market share with Edge means that Microsoft could threaten to fork Chromium, thus keeping Google in check there. ...as for mobile. I agree and wish Microsoft good luck.
- TranquilMarmot 4y ago
  The way I see it, Microsoft did that because they didn't view the web or mobile as mission-critical to their success as a business. Obviously they tried to invest in those areas and failed miserably (pre-Chromium Edge was awful, Windows Mobile was doomed to fail against iOS/Android). Here's an interesting breakdown of their profit: https://techbehemoths.com/blog/how-microsoft-makes-billions https://techbehemoths.com/blog/how-microsoft-makes-billions Azure is a huge cash cow, even in the competitive market (AWS, GCP, IBM, etc. etc.) because nobody wants to handle their own servers now. Many organizations are still a "Microsoft shop" and Microsoft makes loads of money from those contracts, not to mention enormous contracts with the government. It's interesting to see the money they make from gaming so strong; Google tried to get into gaming and keeps failing (see Stadia) and Apple seems to be having mixed results with it. Don't underestimate the strength of the Xbox brand!
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
heywoodlh 4y ago
> Distribute [your content] via methods you control. I'm being nitpicky but it feels off to me to call people out on owning their own platform but then use Cloudflare's CDN instead of running their own. And if they did run their own CDN, they would probably have to use AWS or another worldwide cloud provider and not own the hardware. And if I were Richard Stallman I would probably come down on you for using proprietary chipsets in your hardware instead of totally open source hardware. And you can just keep going deeper and deeper with this train of thought. So what level of ownership is acceptable to this website's author? I feel like the right balance of "ownership" is super subjective. I love a lot of traits of the "old-school" web and am a huge believer in self-hosting as much as possible. But imo yelling at people while on your high horse doesn't encourage anyone.
- rapind 4y ago
  Just like security, you settle for the risk you can afford and are comfortable with. The cloud muddies your grasp of the risks though. A lot of these cloud offerings (like k8s) are incredibly complex, and therefore have a lot of attack vectors, and a lot of points of failure. We depend on layers built on layers, built on layers. You can't really eliminate all of these dependencies, but you can eliminate / reduce some of the highest risk ones (topmost layers).
  - heywoodlh 4y ago
    > Just like security, you settle for the risk you can afford and are comfortable with Right, I totally agree. What I'm not a fan of is this site actively encouraging people to call out others for not owning their own content. If we are gonna compare to security, it would be like suggesting everyone should adhere to the same threat model -- which just isn't practical. > The cloud muddies your grasp of the risks though. Are you saying "you" generally or me specifically? Because I was just using a CDN built on AWS as an example of not being able to own all parts of your stack. It's mostly impossible for an individual and most companies to build a CDN on their own hardware as most entities don't have datacenters around the world.
    - 4y ago
foxhop 4y ago
bumper_crop 4y ago
From 2006 to 2014 I owned my own platform. Several actually. But I turned them down after it became a lot of work to maintain. At the time, it wasn't so obvious the web was dying, but in hindsight I probably helped kill it. In the beginning the web was so new, and growing so fast, with new things, amazing sites, and more people getting online. Like all things in life, competition arises, and better sites started getting much more of the market share. People's expectations for what a website could offer rose tremendously, and would abandon a site if it wasn't up to snuff. Sites needed to have ever improving visuals, better content, better people, better interactivity, better everything. And I couldn't keep up with it. Users went from being happy to try out something new to dismissive and bitter. More and more it felt like work to try to make them happy, to keep building more and better things. And that's exactly what happened. The Internet became work. It's why we all have to be paid to come to work and build the Internet. No one does it for free, because it's a thankless grueling job. The only websites that survived were the ones that made money, and could afford to use that money to hire people. Google, Facebook, Myspace, Stumbleupon, 9gag, and even Something Awful became money oriented rather than community oriented. They had to, or else. The advice to "Always Own Your Own Platform" is a euphemistic way of saying make a whole company out of your site and underpay the only employee (you) for ever. The reason we don't own our own platform anymore is because it's soooo annoying to do so. It wasn't an accident.
- Method-X 4y ago
  For most regular non-tech people this is true. I think it’s best to control your own platform but you can still leverage Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc to grow your brand and make sure they’re onboarded to your own platform of sorts.
  - FormerBandmate 4y ago
    Videos on YouTube will get 800x more views than views on yourownvideowebsite.com (assuming you aren’t a major Hollywood studio). Donald Trump went from 90 million followers on Twitter to 3.2 million followers on his own Twitter clone, and he has such a loyal following that people literally committed treason for him. Network effects are impossible to ignore
hsn915 4y ago
As others have pointed out, there's currently no solution that allows common people to self host. There's a minimum level of linux/sysadmin/devops expertise requried to setup and maintain a self hosted website. I've written a somewhat long essay about this problem: https://hasen.substack.com/simple-self-hosting https://hasen.substack.com/simple-self-hosting A solution is possible but no one is working on it yet as far as I can tell. Instead, everyone wants to make money by taking offline/local applications and turning them into online/cloud applications (even if no specific capability is gained by being on the cloud) just because it's easier to make more money that way.
- 8bitsrule 4y ago
  > here's currently no solution that allows common people to self host. And there sure as hell should be! These days, a lot of people seem to be capable of installing a Linux OS on their machines. Their questions and problems have gotten a lot more sophisticated in recent years. A simple site should be hella easier. I don't understand why such a basic and simple thing hasn't shown-up yet. I constantly run across people that aren't worried about money, just getting text and photos on a simple page and getting them online. The money thing could be a plug-in or something. A Webring plug-in would probably interest more people right away.
  - Santosh83 4y ago
    They haven't shown up because non-tech people don't demand it. They cave in and use one of the managed solutions like wordpress dot com, squarespace etc. A group of devs need to create a solution even without demand & set about popularising it, which is very hard, when most people are satisfied with cloud solutions and don't see the danger that their data could be lost or vendor captured or censored arbitrarily. The second issue is network effects, where these cloud services provide exposure to your content and provide you exposure to related content, which as a self hoster, you must do for yourself. Combined, both problems seem to be remarkably hard when viewed at closeup detail, especially when pitched to "point and click" users with minimal willingness to hack at the command line.
mojuba 4y ago
So, the eternal "You can host your stuff in your basement" vs. "No, not everyone can host their stuff, it's hard". Here's (hopefully) some food for thought on how a decentralized web could work in an ideal world in the future. The problem is, even if you sell amazing shiny turn-key server boxes to every household, where they would be able to seamlessly host everything they currently keep elsewhere (iCloud, Facebook, etc.); even if messaging and other communication becomes absolute P2P in the whole world and therefore there's no need for centralized messaging services — — there would still be the problem of centralized search. The beauty of Internet is not in its content as much as in the ability to discover it. Search implies there has to be a central place where you start it. This is why everyone - techies or not - tend to push their creations to places that provide exposure and discoverability: Medium, SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Then all that is additionally indexed by a meta-engine that is Google today. Centralization upon centralization. I think there might be a solution to this which would be a mix of P2P and locally centralized services. Imagine a gigantic balanced tree of indexing engines that belong, say, to communities. Whenever someone performs a search anywhere in the world, the query is propagated through the tree and is processed in a parallel manner by a great many nodes at once. I'm not sure about the exact algorithm right now, but something suggests Google probably works this way anyway. Except in this ideal world, the search engine doesn't belong to a single authority, but is rather split into myriads of local services maintained by (and paid for) by the communities or some small local companies. If you think it would be wasteful and traffic-heavy, think of the resources and bandwidth that might be freed if Google, Facebook and other giants were replaced by this highly decentralized system, which, again, would work pretty much like the incumbents do, except data would belong to and be hosted by individuals who created it, and search would be one giant brain with potentially millions of cells that perform queries in parallel. How far fetched is this? Very :) But at least I hope the idea is thought provoking.
Jistern 4y ago
bloppe 4y ago
This post makes an epic leap from "A lot of platforms have serious problems" to "Always own your platform".
krthr 4y ago
bluthcon 4y ago
goplayoutside 4y ago
Pika Pods[0] (no affiliation) is an interesting take on facilitating self-hosting. They offer a managed service that simplifies deployment of popular foss apps[1] using containerized SELinux. "Self Hosting as a Service"? Their price estimates (shown on the apps page[1]) start at $1 - $2 per app, per month, a portion of which they share back to the app creators. Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284512 [0] https://www.pikapods.com/ https://www.pikapods.com/ [1] https://www.pikapods.com/apps https://www.pikapods.com/apps
yacine_ 4y ago
Medium, that's a name I haven't seen in a while.
gerash 4y ago
There are several tiers here: 1. Those who have the money to spend on building a web app with their own payment processor, etc. to sell their content or services. 2. Those that use Shopify to do the payment processing and GUI tools to build the website. 3. Those who simply create an entry on Instagram or Google maps and upload a bunch of photos and their phone number 4. Those who don't even bother with the above So it is clearly a trade off where you can outsource the hosting of what you want to present at various levels. I feel the number of people at each tier is exponentially larger than the tier above. So no, owning the platform is not going to be main stream, ever.
Mandatum 4y ago
We've reached a point where you have choices about platforms and have the ability to export the data you input into a platform, back out. Maybe not in a format that's ideal, but it doesn't require the vendor's permission to extract your data out anymore. We can thank a mix of European legislative changes which pushed global policy changes, some sane Large Enterprise software procurement teams (only took 20 years) who normalized asking for it, and scrappy startups with hard-line policies in the Valley who made it trendy to implement these features.
stanislavb 4y ago
With regards to RSS, I'm building a new RSS reader focussed on using RSS without being overwhelmed. That's achieved by giving priority to sources and categories, and having a limit on the number of items per source. If that sounds interesting to you, please give it try https://lenns.io https://lenns.io. You can import/export your subscriptions so you can come and go whenever you want.
r00tanon 4y ago
I agree with the sentiment of this post, but also agree that self-hosting in a scalable, and secure way is challenging. Another thing that is challenging is the corporate security, often augmented by Google, applied to domain names that often results in your site getting blacklisted through no fault of your own. Just try getting those flags removed if your ISP becomes persona non grata. There are so many options now to have a "mostly owned by you" platform while taking advantage of cloud services. Just need to do the pros and cons and choose wisely.
ngcc_hk 4y ago
Not everyone. And that is the issue. If everyone invent or keep his wheels, who are going to fly? And if you do, keep your option open like apple always have their system on 3 platforms and I suspect they might even have a linux option or fpga or five… You never really own your platform. Just partially.
dwheeler 4y ago
I prefer a variant of this: own your domain name and make it easy to move. I don't think everyone has to run their own server. It's fine to pay someone or use a free service. The issue is, can you change who hosts it? If you can, you are in control.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nvr219 4y ago
Hosting your own LAMP server is one thing, but I have been touching computers for 30 years and I still would not trust myself to to roll my own ecommerce anything. It sucks but I'll always outsource with shopify/paypal/patreon/whatever.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  You can’t even run your own realistically. Taking credit cards requires an insanely difficult and expensive auditing process for basically no benefit when you could be up and running instantly with PayPal/etc.
rd07 4y ago
I used to have my own blog with my own domain from 2009-2012. The increasing popularity of Facebook in my country and the waning of my passion for writing blog post, make me abandon it. Currently I still have a blog in a couple of blogging platforms, but they are unmaintained and it has been a long time since the last time I wrote there. Personally, I want it to go back to how it was before. I want to start a new blog with my own domain. But I don't know if I can write again like it used to be.
aeturnum 4y ago
I think owning your own platform is a really cool thing to do and I think we live in a golden age for doing it. It's never been easier and you've never had more options. I also think that placing self-ownership before all other concerns will be wrong for many people. The internet is bigger than ever and for many purposes the very real autonomy and flexibility you get out of self-hosting will be outweighed by using an ecosystem that some company is investing money into. To me, the key is realizing that hosting is work - but it might be work that you enjoy and / or derive benefit from. When someone else does that work for you, they are deriving benefit from it, but sometimes that really is a win / win.
FpUser 4y ago
I own my platform thank you.
FpUser 4y ago
There is also in between solution. There are whole bunch of small providers that would host your website and if you keep a copy you are safe and small provider will not dictate you what your content should be (within the law of course).
donatj 4y ago
I was just wondering the other day why video podcasting wasn't more popular? Back before YouTube was really used for series, I used to follow a decent number of video diaries essentially, RSS shows, with Miro (a video podcast player that doesn't exist anymore). Ask a Ninja, Hope is Emo, Rocket Boom, Scriggity - to name a few. I mean, sure YouTubes ad model is probably a big part of it, I'm just surprised that aren't more channels that syndicate via RSS as well. I think the desire is there though in a lot of the community, fed up with the algorithm choosing what they actually end up seeing despite their subscriptions.
deleted 4y ago
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rvz 4y ago
Exactly. Gab and Mastodon have done exactly that and are self-hosting. Whether if they are alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, etc is another story. Both are failures in that regard and it is not early days.
sneak 4y ago
Facebook (Instagram) and Twitter convince you that getting followers is growth. All you're doing is donating content to them and giving them advertiser profiles so that they can sell your own audience back to you. Algorithmic timelines mean that "your" followers/subscribers see what the owners want them to see, and not the stuff from you that they explicitly subscribed to. This website is good advice. Stop sharecropping for billionaires.
DantesKite 4y ago
I wonder if Substack qualifies as owning your own platform, since you can export your subscriber/email list even if they kick you off the platform and go somewhere else.
- benoliver999 4y ago
  It doesn't, but for me keeping a copy of your content somewhere local is more important than 'owning your platform'. I lost a whole blog I ran daily from 2005-2013 because when I set it up I didn't understand vendor lock-in. I just used the web form, fired-and-forgot about the posts. When it came time to move to a new host, the pictures all got compressed and the formatting got thrown out. It's not a mistake I'll make twice, now every blog post is stored in text files before it goes anywhere.
EGreg 4y ago
You can: https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform
mark_l_watson 4y ago
I think owning your own domain is enough. Use social media to place links to your web site and blog. I don’t completely take my own advice: I have gone back to using Blogger for the convenience, but I periodically save/dump my data.
tootie 4y ago
I think everyone reading this as "host your own servers" is missing the point. This more about owning your relationship with your users. Running a fully managed website with video content and a donation form is owning your platform even if you use nothing but SaaS products. Posting to YouTube is losing your platform. One of my company's big products is podcasts. Podcasts are traditionally distributed via RSS. So long as we have an RSS feed of our audio and a website under a domain name we own, then we own our platform. The mechanics are immaterial. We are paying vendors for services but we own our data and our relationship to users. Losing our platform would be becoming a Spotify exclusive. Then Spotify owns our platform and we are we just get a cut.
cy_overlord 4y ago
Not everyone needs a platform to be honest. Most people lives their lives without posting anything online, just jumping from platform to platform searching for something to consume. And the argument that people would worried if they lost access to their data is almost invalid, most don't even backup their phones, much less data on platforms. And for people who needs to distribute stuff, they would just opt-in for every platform, self-owned or big tech. Removing middlemen or the whole decentralization thing is a welcomed change, so we get more to be in control more. But this is a paradigm shift, like how we moved from offline to online, the ways and methods of doing things need to change. For instance, instead of self-hosting the entire thing, I imagine a way for people to actually host their own data, while big tech host the frontend and backend. When you want your data to be displayed on Facebook, you will need to provide a temporary access key that can be revoked anytime.
DeathArrow 4y ago
Owning the content and the platform is valuable for both individuals and companies. I wouldn't want my data or content to be taken hostage and me having to rent the access on it.
caoweiyuan 4y ago
On this website, it only says "please do it", but didn't mention too much on "how". Own your platform is ideal, but makes your platform discoverable, maintainable, and even profitable is hard but possible. It needs protocols (like RSS, but much better). That is what our dreamer developers should work on.
rmbyrro 4y ago
The main issue for creators is distribution. They go to platforms for that. If they host on their own, they lose it. Aside, it talks about ditching the middleman. Problem is these platforms already dominated people's attention. They are an unavoidable middleman. Creators have to compete for attention there, convincing these platforms they deserve some. Unless these problems are solved in large scale by open alternatives, nothing will change.
MarquesMa 4y ago
It's hard to distribute content from your own platform. Most successful content creators are relying on many platforms, it's virtually impossible to fight them. But it's always to have a small resort of yours on the internet. It doesn't have to be big and great, and it can be as simple as a business card that points to your footprints on every other platform. For example, many Russian content creators are losing their audience immediately after they're sanctioned. It's always a good thing when people search your name, your own site appears on the first page.
Havoc 4y ago
I don’t think the hosting is even that hard of a problem. It’s the network and discovery effects of platforms that are hard to duplicate.
mm007emko 4y ago
I don't think you need to own your own platform. It's a trade-off decision between total cost of ownership and your time. You can buy a new server with enough power to be able to serve everybody even during huge spikes but it's expensive, however relatively maintenance-free. You can have and old PC with low upfront costs but old consumer-grade hardware breaks down and you have to maintain it (sometimes we have to speak about "preventive maintenance"). Or you can put your things into a VPS or cloud for the price of electricity and a good internet connection alone (at least in my country, prices really are THAT low). If you don't vendor-lock yourself in you can then move your things from one VPS/cloud to another. And you don't even have to start with Kubernetes cluster upfront. You can start with "old-school" "bare metal + operating system with root access" server, then move your application behind a load balancer, then to Docker/K8s when it grows. I see so many projects suffocating to death by "thinking big". I even encountered an e-commerce site which didn't even had a proper payment gateways, well, Cash on Delivery services still exist today. Not ideal but it worked (and the goods arrived OK). But I'm not telling to "own your platform", that's BS nowadays. "Always have a way out" is much better. Start small and right-size often.
frozencell 4y ago
But how can HN be so cynic about distributed systems like Bitcoin despite the scams, and talk everyday about ownership.

322 points by ddtaylor 4y ago

dijit 4y ago

Previous (2019): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20145704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20145704

phnofive 4y ago
Off topic: this was posted and reposted four times in 2019 in a burst of three in March and two in June. The only one which hit was June 10, 2019. Well, as they say, second to last try is the charm.

mro_name 4y ago

http://IndieWeb.org/POSSE http://IndieWeb.org/POSSE to a rescue.

mawise 4y ago

Haven[1] is your own platform for publishing privately when you're not trying to "build an audience" [1]: https://havenweb.org https://havenweb.org

luckydenvermint 4y ago
Interesting. How's that differ from PostHaven [1]? [1]: https://posthaven.com https://posthaven.com
- mawise 4y ago
  Haven is about _private_ blogging as a social media alternative. Post privately, share with your friends/family, even expose your blog with authenticated RSS. The crypto world has co-opted the term "Decentralized", but in a non-crypto sense, Haven is what decentralized social media could look like. Happy to chat more (and apologies for not catching your question sooner). Feel free to message me on the haven contact page: https://havenweb.org/contact.html https://havenweb.org/contact.html
- spidey1 4y ago
  Looks like havenweb can be self hosted and posthaven doesn’t offer that.

altdataseller 4y ago

Sounds cool in theory but almost impossible and impractical. For example, you can have a newsletter but google could decide your domain belongs in Spam forever. There goes that “owned platform”

convolvatron 4y ago
I don't think there is any fix for that except for people to deliberatively and incrementally take that power from their hands. not betting on the outcome. I guess the old real hope is that 15 years from now when google is finally no longer relevant, that smaller business and individuals diffuse that control more broadly. or we get google 2.0
c2h5oh 4y ago
Well, technically it's still an owned platform, just in this context it's a platform that got owned by google.
gerdesj 4y ago
From your comment you seem to think that Google somehow owns your arse. Perhaps you use them for your email and other functions and fail to see over the top of their walled garden? There is no doubt that Google largely own Search and several other functions but they really don't own the internet as a whole. Often we see sad articles on HN about how the monster in the room twats someone into oblivion thanks to a stupid "AI" making a judgement call that a human would be embarrassed about. To avoid or perhaps slightly mitigate that fate is well documented hereabouts and elsewhere. For what it is worth (in my experience) Google is not inimical on an arbitrary basis. They really don't decide anything - it's all algorithms, pixie dust and bollocks. Avoid that and you are golden. As it turns out, I've been able to run many "local" email systems and even my own little IT company quite happily for over two decades, without giving much thought to Google. We do have a newsletter email that we send out too. Some of my customers fly quite close to the edge of the spam/ham boundary. I operate in the UK. Bizarrely, I can quite happily run SMTP from a domestic FTTC connection here, with a little care.
- sneak 4y ago

benoliver999 4y ago

Really hard for non-techies; even a hosted WordPress isn't easy to use. I've been asked a few times 'I want to write online, what do I do?' and it's hard to find easy to use answers that don't involve vendor lock-in. Or me having to provide support forever. SSGs with plain text files are brilliant once you are set up, but it's a big hurdle getting there. Best I can do is try to find platforms with sane exit strategies.

azangru 4y ago
> Really hard for non-techies Yes; but it’s not like even that many techies host their own content. I love how Jeremy Keith copies everything he tweets to his own site [0]. Wanted to check how he set it all up; but his site isn’t open-sourced. [0] - https://adactio.com https://adactio.com
- al_borland 4y ago
  Looks like it's the other way around. He posts on his site and it syndicates to the other platforms. https://youtu.be/X3SrZuH00GQ?t=852 https://youtu.be/X3SrZuH00GQ?t=852
  - azangru 4y ago
    Even better! The true POSSE spirit!
3np 4y ago
May be worth considering: Lightweight ActivityPub writing platform, straightforward to self-host but there are also managed hosts: https://writefreely.org/ https://writefreely.org/
FalconSensei 4y ago
> SSGs with plain text files are brilliant once you are set up, but it's a big hurdle getting there. Even in that case, not nearly as practical, unless you mostly do long-form and only post from your computer. Even with SSG set up, having to be on the computer to create a draft, or make a quick correction, is really a bother. Also, when you own everything, you end up spending more time tinkering with it, which is not bad per se if you are having fun, but terrible if your goal is to actually post. Those 2 things - harder to post and easier to get sidetracked - explains why so many SSG'd blogs are made up of a few posts explaining why and how it was set up, and maybe a couple actual posts.

azangru 4y ago

> Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube entice us to give them our creative work. It's time to take it back ... Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself. So, youtube, right? Where would you host your videos if you had a mind to take them back?

dibujante 4y ago
I would simply spend millions of dollars serving my own viral videos.
- getcrunk 4y ago
  Well. I'd wager you can server your 1 viral video for max a few grand a month.
  - TranquilMarmot 4y ago
    Paid for by all the Google ads you run or money from Patreon haha
- bin_bash 4y ago
  paid for with what, patreon?
aqme28 4y ago
> Google Yeah, stop letting Google dictate your search results! Create your own search engine and own your platform!
- yellowapple 4y ago
  Ain't sure if you know this, but in case you don't, Google is a lot more than just a search engine nowadays.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

jlbbellefeuille 4y ago

The reason why you should own your own platform is called “platform risk”. https://www.startupillustrated.com/Archive/Platform-Risk/ https://www.startupillustrated.com/Archive/Platform-Risk/

digitallyfree 4y ago

In a perfect world, everyone would have their own servers in their homes or colos. Fiber would be cheaply avaliable everywhere, and everyone would have the know-how to manage their locally hosted services. In truth, it's quite a lot of work to manage and maintain. Now there are say Docker Wordpress images that can be set up in ten minutes on AWS. However part of self-hosting is that there's no technical support - you're on your own if something breaks, there are updates, etc. Whereas a managed service abstracts all that away, and thus is appealing to a mainstream audience. While we at HN may like the technical side of things, many creators are uninterested in spending hours debugging a performance issue and want to write/draw/etc. Personally I have servers in my basement and run a Matrix instance, OpenVPN, and a webserver (static site fronted by Cloudflare) as my publicly exposed services. I also have additional services like Landscape and network storage on LAN. When you run all those services, you don't just follow a guide, set it up, and leave it. While that may work for a couple months, something will break eventually and you'll have to scramble to fix it without understanding why. To do things properly and get good uptime you need to understand how things work, why they're configured that way, and have good backup and recovery practices. Security is also another factor, especially if you are storing private or confidential information. Also for creators, there are services like Youtube and Twitch which are pretty much impossible to replicate without massive cost and infrastructure. If you're just doing text and images, then you could use a VPS or a CDN fronted homeserver and operate your own website. I'm not a vtuber, but if I was it simply wouldn't be possible for me to run my own service even though I'm interested in this stuff. The only thing I really can recommend is to keep local copies of all your work on disk, properly backed up. Then at least if you lose access to the service, you can bootstrap again somewhere else.

ChadNauseam 4y ago
I think users appreciate having a feed that combines everyone’s posts and algorithmically recommends the best ones, like youtube or twitter do. That can be solved with RSS now, but RSS doesn’t get you likes and replies etc. And they appreciate having usernames so they can say “check me out at @username”. You can solve that by making everyone buy a domain name, but we have zero infrastructure right now for letting people use their domain name as their username. The cryptocurrency community does seem at least halfway interested in solving these problems fwiw, but they do still have some major scaling problems to overcome.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

The issue is that you will always need some type of infrastructure to work. Maybe we need government investment in infrastructure. Having government infrastructure allows a lot of small businesses to work. Take for example the road system. There are so many business that depend on the roads. Imagine if they were all owned by private companies that could kick you off at their whim? The postal system also is very similar, though recently it has been getting less investment. One advantage of government infrastructure is that there are laws and rights such as due process/freedom of speech/etc. I am not sure what that would look like in practice for the digital world. One area that be useful is digital identity. Other people have mentioned it, but maybe having the Postal Service provide you with a secure identity card (similar to what Estonia provides). This would enable “social login” without being dependent on Google/Facebook/Apple/etc. The truth is owning your own platform is beyond what an individual developer or small (or even medium sized) company can do.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

What's always blown my mind is the trend for businesses to fail to understand this. Building your entire company around AWS means a future competitor also already has full control of your company and access to your data. And I think the most hilarious example is Microsoft, a trillion-dollar level company which chose to hand over the entirety of the web (by switching to Chromium) and mobile (by abandoning WinMo for Android) and doesn't understand how they handed control of their entire business to their top competitor. The architects of those two decisions probably guaranteed the future collapse of Microsoft.

wolpoli 4y ago
Microsoft tried to continue to maintain their own browser for years without any market share to show for it. For whatever reason, the browser just couldn't match the level of polish in Google Chrome or Apple Safari. This current situation is stable for Microsoft - the fact that Microsoft is gaining market share with Edge means that Microsoft could threaten to fork Chromium, thus keeping Google in check there. ...as for mobile. I agree and wish Microsoft good luck.
TranquilMarmot 4y ago
The way I see it, Microsoft did that because they didn't view the web or mobile as mission-critical to their success as a business. Obviously they tried to invest in those areas and failed miserably (pre-Chromium Edge was awful, Windows Mobile was doomed to fail against iOS/Android). Here's an interesting breakdown of their profit: https://techbehemoths.com/blog/how-microsoft-makes-billions https://techbehemoths.com/blog/how-microsoft-makes-billions Azure is a huge cash cow, even in the competitive market (AWS, GCP, IBM, etc. etc.) because nobody wants to handle their own servers now. Many organizations are still a "Microsoft shop" and Microsoft makes loads of money from those contracts, not to mention enormous contracts with the government. It's interesting to see the money they make from gaming so strong; Google tried to get into gaming and keeps failing (see Stadia) and Apple seems to be having mixed results with it. Don't underestimate the strength of the Xbox brand!
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago

heywoodlh 4y ago

> Distribute [your content] via methods you control. I'm being nitpicky but it feels off to me to call people out on owning their own platform but then use Cloudflare's CDN instead of running their own. And if they did run their own CDN, they would probably have to use AWS or another worldwide cloud provider and not own the hardware. And if I were Richard Stallman I would probably come down on you for using proprietary chipsets in your hardware instead of totally open source hardware. And you can just keep going deeper and deeper with this train of thought. So what level of ownership is acceptable to this website's author? I feel like the right balance of "ownership" is super subjective. I love a lot of traits of the "old-school" web and am a huge believer in self-hosting as much as possible. But imo yelling at people while on your high horse doesn't encourage anyone.

rapind 4y ago
Just like security, you settle for the risk you can afford and are comfortable with. The cloud muddies your grasp of the risks though. A lot of these cloud offerings (like k8s) are incredibly complex, and therefore have a lot of attack vectors, and a lot of points of failure. We depend on layers built on layers, built on layers. You can't really eliminate all of these dependencies, but you can eliminate / reduce some of the highest risk ones (topmost layers).
- heywoodlh 4y ago
  > Just like security, you settle for the risk you can afford and are comfortable with Right, I totally agree. What I'm not a fan of is this site actively encouraging people to call out others for not owning their own content. If we are gonna compare to security, it would be like suggesting everyone should adhere to the same threat model -- which just isn't practical. > The cloud muddies your grasp of the risks though. Are you saying "you" generally or me specifically? Because I was just using a CDN built on AWS as an example of not being able to own all parts of your stack. It's mostly impossible for an individual and most companies to build a CDN on their own hardware as most entities don't have datacenters around the world.
  - 4y ago

foxhop 4y ago

bumper_crop 4y ago

From 2006 to 2014 I owned my own platform. Several actually. But I turned them down after it became a lot of work to maintain. At the time, it wasn't so obvious the web was dying, but in hindsight I probably helped kill it. In the beginning the web was so new, and growing so fast, with new things, amazing sites, and more people getting online. Like all things in life, competition arises, and better sites started getting much more of the market share. People's expectations for what a website could offer rose tremendously, and would abandon a site if it wasn't up to snuff. Sites needed to have ever improving visuals, better content, better people, better interactivity, better everything. And I couldn't keep up with it. Users went from being happy to try out something new to dismissive and bitter. More and more it felt like work to try to make them happy, to keep building more and better things. And that's exactly what happened. The Internet became work. It's why we all have to be paid to come to work and build the Internet. No one does it for free, because it's a thankless grueling job. The only websites that survived were the ones that made money, and could afford to use that money to hire people. Google, Facebook, Myspace, Stumbleupon, 9gag, and even Something Awful became money oriented rather than community oriented. They had to, or else. The advice to "Always Own Your Own Platform" is a euphemistic way of saying make a whole company out of your site and underpay the only employee (you) for ever. The reason we don't own our own platform anymore is because it's soooo annoying to do so. It wasn't an accident.

Method-X 4y ago
For most regular non-tech people this is true. I think it’s best to control your own platform but you can still leverage Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc to grow your brand and make sure they’re onboarded to your own platform of sorts.
- FormerBandmate 4y ago
  Videos on YouTube will get 800x more views than views on yourownvideowebsite.com (assuming you aren’t a major Hollywood studio). Donald Trump went from 90 million followers on Twitter to 3.2 million followers on his own Twitter clone, and he has such a loyal following that people literally committed treason for him. Network effects are impossible to ignore

hsn915 4y ago

As others have pointed out, there's currently no solution that allows common people to self host. There's a minimum level of linux/sysadmin/devops expertise requried to setup and maintain a self hosted website. I've written a somewhat long essay about this problem: https://hasen.substack.com/simple-self-hosting https://hasen.substack.com/simple-self-hosting A solution is possible but no one is working on it yet as far as I can tell. Instead, everyone wants to make money by taking offline/local applications and turning them into online/cloud applications (even if no specific capability is gained by being on the cloud) just because it's easier to make more money that way.

8bitsrule 4y ago
> here's currently no solution that allows common people to self host. And there sure as hell should be! These days, a lot of people seem to be capable of installing a Linux OS on their machines. Their questions and problems have gotten a lot more sophisticated in recent years. A simple site should be hella easier. I don't understand why such a basic and simple thing hasn't shown-up yet. I constantly run across people that aren't worried about money, just getting text and photos on a simple page and getting them online. The money thing could be a plug-in or something. A Webring plug-in would probably interest more people right away.
- Santosh83 4y ago
  They haven't shown up because non-tech people don't demand it. They cave in and use one of the managed solutions like wordpress dot com, squarespace etc. A group of devs need to create a solution even without demand & set about popularising it, which is very hard, when most people are satisfied with cloud solutions and don't see the danger that their data could be lost or vendor captured or censored arbitrarily. The second issue is network effects, where these cloud services provide exposure to your content and provide you exposure to related content, which as a self hoster, you must do for yourself. Combined, both problems seem to be remarkably hard when viewed at closeup detail, especially when pitched to "point and click" users with minimal willingness to hack at the command line.

mojuba 4y ago

So, the eternal "You can host your stuff in your basement" vs. "No, not everyone can host their stuff, it's hard". Here's (hopefully) some food for thought on how a decentralized web could work in an ideal world in the future. The problem is, even if you sell amazing shiny turn-key server boxes to every household, where they would be able to seamlessly host everything they currently keep elsewhere (iCloud, Facebook, etc.); even if messaging and other communication becomes absolute P2P in the whole world and therefore there's no need for centralized messaging services — — there would still be the problem of centralized search. The beauty of Internet is not in its content as much as in the ability to discover it. Search implies there has to be a central place where you start it. This is why everyone - techies or not - tend to push their creations to places that provide exposure and discoverability: Medium, SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Then all that is additionally indexed by a meta-engine that is Google today. Centralization upon centralization. I think there might be a solution to this which would be a mix of P2P and locally centralized services. Imagine a gigantic balanced tree of indexing engines that belong, say, to communities. Whenever someone performs a search anywhere in the world, the query is propagated through the tree and is processed in a parallel manner by a great many nodes at once. I'm not sure about the exact algorithm right now, but something suggests Google probably works this way anyway. Except in this ideal world, the search engine doesn't belong to a single authority, but is rather split into myriads of local services maintained by (and paid for) by the communities or some small local companies. If you think it would be wasteful and traffic-heavy, think of the resources and bandwidth that might be freed if Google, Facebook and other giants were replaced by this highly decentralized system, which, again, would work pretty much like the incumbents do, except data would belong to and be hosted by individuals who created it, and search would be one giant brain with potentially millions of cells that perform queries in parallel. How far fetched is this? Very :) But at least I hope the idea is thought provoking.

Jistern 4y ago

bloppe 4y ago

This post makes an epic leap from "A lot of platforms have serious problems" to "Always own your platform".

krthr 4y ago

bluthcon 4y ago

goplayoutside 4y ago

Pika Pods[0] (no affiliation) is an interesting take on facilitating self-hosting. They offer a managed service that simplifies deployment of popular foss apps[1] using containerized SELinux. "Self Hosting as a Service"? Their price estimates (shown on the apps page[1]) start at $1 - $2 per app, per month, a portion of which they share back to the app creators. Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284512 [0] https://www.pikapods.com/ https://www.pikapods.com/ [1] https://www.pikapods.com/apps https://www.pikapods.com/apps

yacine_ 4y ago

Medium, that's a name I haven't seen in a while.

gerash 4y ago

There are several tiers here: 1. Those who have the money to spend on building a web app with their own payment processor, etc. to sell their content or services. 2. Those that use Shopify to do the payment processing and GUI tools to build the website. 3. Those who simply create an entry on Instagram or Google maps and upload a bunch of photos and their phone number 4. Those who don't even bother with the above So it is clearly a trade off where you can outsource the hosting of what you want to present at various levels. I feel the number of people at each tier is exponentially larger than the tier above. So no, owning the platform is not going to be main stream, ever.

Mandatum 4y ago

We've reached a point where you have choices about platforms and have the ability to export the data you input into a platform, back out. Maybe not in a format that's ideal, but it doesn't require the vendor's permission to extract your data out anymore. We can thank a mix of European legislative changes which pushed global policy changes, some sane Large Enterprise software procurement teams (only took 20 years) who normalized asking for it, and scrappy startups with hard-line policies in the Valley who made it trendy to implement these features.

stanislavb 4y ago

With regards to RSS, I'm building a new RSS reader focussed on using RSS without being overwhelmed. That's achieved by giving priority to sources and categories, and having a limit on the number of items per source. If that sounds interesting to you, please give it try https://lenns.io https://lenns.io. You can import/export your subscriptions so you can come and go whenever you want.

r00tanon 4y ago

I agree with the sentiment of this post, but also agree that self-hosting in a scalable, and secure way is challenging. Another thing that is challenging is the corporate security, often augmented by Google, applied to domain names that often results in your site getting blacklisted through no fault of your own. Just try getting those flags removed if your ISP becomes persona non grata. There are so many options now to have a "mostly owned by you" platform while taking advantage of cloud services. Just need to do the pros and cons and choose wisely.

ngcc_hk 4y ago

Not everyone. And that is the issue. If everyone invent or keep his wheels, who are going to fly? And if you do, keep your option open like apple always have their system on 3 platforms and I suspect they might even have a linux option or fpga or five… You never really own your platform. Just partially.

dwheeler 4y ago

I prefer a variant of this: own your domain name and make it easy to move. I don't think everyone has to run their own server. It's fine to pay someone or use a free service. The issue is, can you change who hosts it? If you can, you are in control.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nvr219 4y ago

Hosting your own LAMP server is one thing, but I have been touching computers for 30 years and I still would not trust myself to to roll my own ecommerce anything. It sucks but I'll always outsource with shopify/paypal/patreon/whatever.

Gigachad 4y ago
You can’t even run your own realistically. Taking credit cards requires an insanely difficult and expensive auditing process for basically no benefit when you could be up and running instantly with PayPal/etc.

rd07 4y ago

I used to have my own blog with my own domain from 2009-2012. The increasing popularity of Facebook in my country and the waning of my passion for writing blog post, make me abandon it. Currently I still have a blog in a couple of blogging platforms, but they are unmaintained and it has been a long time since the last time I wrote there. Personally, I want it to go back to how it was before. I want to start a new blog with my own domain. But I don't know if I can write again like it used to be.

aeturnum 4y ago

I think owning your own platform is a really cool thing to do and I think we live in a golden age for doing it. It's never been easier and you've never had more options. I also think that placing self-ownership before all other concerns will be wrong for many people. The internet is bigger than ever and for many purposes the very real autonomy and flexibility you get out of self-hosting will be outweighed by using an ecosystem that some company is investing money into. To me, the key is realizing that hosting is work - but it might be work that you enjoy and / or derive benefit from. When someone else does that work for you, they are deriving benefit from it, but sometimes that really is a win / win.

FpUser 4y ago

I own my platform thank you.

FpUser 4y ago

There is also in between solution. There are whole bunch of small providers that would host your website and if you keep a copy you are safe and small provider will not dictate you what your content should be (within the law of course).

donatj 4y ago

I was just wondering the other day why video podcasting wasn't more popular? Back before YouTube was really used for series, I used to follow a decent number of video diaries essentially, RSS shows, with Miro (a video podcast player that doesn't exist anymore). Ask a Ninja, Hope is Emo, Rocket Boom, Scriggity - to name a few. I mean, sure YouTubes ad model is probably a big part of it, I'm just surprised that aren't more channels that syndicate via RSS as well. I think the desire is there though in a lot of the community, fed up with the algorithm choosing what they actually end up seeing despite their subscriptions.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rvz 4y ago

Exactly. Gab and Mastodon have done exactly that and are self-hosting. Whether if they are alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, etc is another story. Both are failures in that regard and it is not early days.

sneak 4y ago

Facebook (Instagram) and Twitter convince you that getting followers is growth. All you're doing is donating content to them and giving them advertiser profiles so that they can sell your own audience back to you. Algorithmic timelines mean that "your" followers/subscribers see what the owners want them to see, and not the stuff from you that they explicitly subscribed to. This website is good advice. Stop sharecropping for billionaires.

DantesKite 4y ago

I wonder if Substack qualifies as owning your own platform, since you can export your subscriber/email list even if they kick you off the platform and go somewhere else.

benoliver999 4y ago
It doesn't, but for me keeping a copy of your content somewhere local is more important than 'owning your platform'. I lost a whole blog I ran daily from 2005-2013 because when I set it up I didn't understand vendor lock-in. I just used the web form, fired-and-forgot about the posts. When it came time to move to a new host, the pictures all got compressed and the formatting got thrown out. It's not a mistake I'll make twice, now every blog post is stored in text files before it goes anywhere.

EGreg 4y ago

You can: https://qbix.com/platform https://qbix.com/platform

mark_l_watson 4y ago

I think owning your own domain is enough. Use social media to place links to your web site and blog. I don’t completely take my own advice: I have gone back to using Blogger for the convenience, but I periodically save/dump my data.

tootie 4y ago

I think everyone reading this as "host your own servers" is missing the point. This more about owning your relationship with your users. Running a fully managed website with video content and a donation form is owning your platform even if you use nothing but SaaS products. Posting to YouTube is losing your platform. One of my company's big products is podcasts. Podcasts are traditionally distributed via RSS. So long as we have an RSS feed of our audio and a website under a domain name we own, then we own our platform. The mechanics are immaterial. We are paying vendors for services but we own our data and our relationship to users. Losing our platform would be becoming a Spotify exclusive. Then Spotify owns our platform and we are we just get a cut.

cy_overlord 4y ago

Not everyone needs a platform to be honest. Most people lives their lives without posting anything online, just jumping from platform to platform searching for something to consume. And the argument that people would worried if they lost access to their data is almost invalid, most don't even backup their phones, much less data on platforms. And for people who needs to distribute stuff, they would just opt-in for every platform, self-owned or big tech. Removing middlemen or the whole decentralization thing is a welcomed change, so we get more to be in control more. But this is a paradigm shift, like how we moved from offline to online, the ways and methods of doing things need to change. For instance, instead of self-hosting the entire thing, I imagine a way for people to actually host their own data, while big tech host the frontend and backend. When you want your data to be displayed on Facebook, you will need to provide a temporary access key that can be revoked anytime.

DeathArrow 4y ago

Owning the content and the platform is valuable for both individuals and companies. I wouldn't want my data or content to be taken hostage and me having to rent the access on it.

caoweiyuan 4y ago

On this website, it only says "please do it", but didn't mention too much on "how". Own your platform is ideal, but makes your platform discoverable, maintainable, and even profitable is hard but possible. It needs protocols (like RSS, but much better). That is what our dreamer developers should work on.

rmbyrro 4y ago

The main issue for creators is distribution. They go to platforms for that. If they host on their own, they lose it. Aside, it talks about ditching the middleman. Problem is these platforms already dominated people's attention. They are an unavoidable middleman. Creators have to compete for attention there, convincing these platforms they deserve some. Unless these problems are solved in large scale by open alternatives, nothing will change.

MarquesMa 4y ago

It's hard to distribute content from your own platform. Most successful content creators are relying on many platforms, it's virtually impossible to fight them. But it's always to have a small resort of yours on the internet. It doesn't have to be big and great, and it can be as simple as a business card that points to your footprints on every other platform. For example, many Russian content creators are losing their audience immediately after they're sanctioned. It's always a good thing when people search your name, your own site appears on the first page.

Havoc 4y ago

I don’t think the hosting is even that hard of a problem. It’s the network and discovery effects of platforms that are hard to duplicate.

mm007emko 4y ago

I don't think you need to own your own platform. It's a trade-off decision between total cost of ownership and your time. You can buy a new server with enough power to be able to serve everybody even during huge spikes but it's expensive, however relatively maintenance-free. You can have and old PC with low upfront costs but old consumer-grade hardware breaks down and you have to maintain it (sometimes we have to speak about "preventive maintenance"). Or you can put your things into a VPS or cloud for the price of electricity and a good internet connection alone (at least in my country, prices really are THAT low). If you don't vendor-lock yourself in you can then move your things from one VPS/cloud to another. And you don't even have to start with Kubernetes cluster upfront. You can start with "old-school" "bare metal + operating system with root access" server, then move your application behind a load balancer, then to Docker/K8s when it grows. I see so many projects suffocating to death by "thinking big". I even encountered an e-commerce site which didn't even had a proper payment gateways, well, Cash on Delivery services still exist today. Not ideal but it worked (and the goods arrived OK). But I'm not telling to "own your platform", that's BS nowadays. "Always have a way out" is much better. Start small and right-size often.

frozencell 4y ago

But how can HN be so cynic about distributed systems like Bitcoin despite the scams, and talk everyday about ownership.