15 ms·

Every person on the planet should have their own website

222 points by landgenoot 3y ago

8bitsrule 3y ago
Long ago I began writing (with a pen) into 'journals'/commonplace-books... into pre-bound books of empty pages. With never a worry about security or lost data (short of floods/fires/). With a potential lifetime of centuries. They could be OCRed I guess. But why? Except for 'notable' people, I've never run into a library where such things are accessible. How much of my family would share my old interests? Being 'immortalized on the web' seems ... a bit vain. I've often wished for a way to learn far more human details about great-grandparents (and earlier). Not just the "born, married, died" record. If they'd wanted it, for the self-selected few. So I imagine solarized tombstones. They could electronically play-back (and/or downloading) files (audio/video/text) I thought worth sharing. Frozen in crystals. For centuries. Like that 'library' in the 2002 remake of 'Time Machine'.
jslpc 3y ago
I agree with the general sentiment of the post, but I gravitate more towards e-ink displays, which has it's tradeoffs. Lugging around my Kindle Oasis is a chore, so I'll only bring it with me when I really plan on reading. That being said, I like the idea of just using your phone. I scroll through Twitter, HN, Reddit, etc. a good chunk of the day anyways, might as well spend that time reading something worthwhile instead. I also want to point out that I really like the look and feel of this website. I adore minimalist design for blogs, and my own website is similarly minimal but not quite the same. The author also touches on some subjects I find particularly interesting; investing, drugs, school (or lack thereof), etc.
ForestCritter 3y ago
...so that AI can suck them up...
Endurancee 3y ago
There should be a downvote button on Hackernews too.
dusted 3y ago
And in addition, everyone on the planet should have their own public routable IP address on their home Internet connection so they can host said website on their own hardware.
rldjbpin 3y ago
i believe the op's vision is already true: it is called social media.
moogly 3y ago
Humans already generate too much garbage; thinking everything is worth saving is pretty deluded in my book. I hope this comment doesn't end up on web.archive.org. Actually, the fact that I feel that is probable indication that I shouldn't even be posting it. I self-censor myself a lot these days: writing replies in a text editor and then deleting them instead of posting them online because I recognize the voicing of my opinions as rather pointless.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  The cost of carrying some words is so close to zero. Given the scale of data we do carry, it seems callous to me to begrudge people a couple megabytes of words in their life. Our ability to tell what is garbage & what has use seems incredibly poor. We just don't know. Who how & when do we take your mercenary plan into action to decide when to wipe things out? And we may glean great insight & wisdom from the aggregate, from being able to view historical sentiment. Efforts like the Google N-grams project can show incredible trends & patterns happening across time, and is just an incredibly simple first-level example of analysis.
hot_gril 3y ago
Nice try, FBI.
villgax 3y ago
It should be the other way around, if the government mandates an email address, a phone number & a house address then it should be made available to a citizen
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
There's a recognizable & real value to this call. It presents something hopeful: that values human spirit, that says we each have value and are unique & worthwhile. And it leaves the door open to the future; think of how hard scholars today go to find words from antiquity, what effort they take to understand the past: isn't it a noble idea to equip the past with a better view, to be able to see broadly into what the world is today? The world is so tired & frustrated & angsted up, over so many situations. The comments here almost universally come in extremely hot. They are short on possibility, actively disbelieve in what we have. I confess it's indeed reasonable to have some curmudgeonliness, to assume people are useless & uninteresting. But isn't an effort like this what would make the world better? If we thought laterally, if we both recognized that we have but one small voice but also cherished that light? To me, what's proposed here is the most basic inner-core of social contract: the recognition of human value, human dignity. These comments are amok with only the downsides of today. They are afraid of the couple scattering of examples of the weird that emerges at scale, the people harassed or bugged in real life. But there's so many hundreds of millions of people who are posting & sharing & blogging just fine. These comments disdain people & their discard their worth, without pausing to reflect on what gems in the rough might emerge. No one takes a long view, and asks how humanity might be different if we thought long, if we made a long context part of our existence. These attitudes engender the short term mercenary small view of exstence, they promote the havoc & irrelevance that they themselves disdain. There's so many interesting fractal possibilities & growths we could make towards this kind of idea. The costs have never been lower to keep & preserve. The prompt, of writing for the long, for the world: that calling I think would change us, would help us beget something closer to a smart & sensible noosphere, that can care, that escapes the traps of negativity & turmoil-driven attention hounding, that would help us break free of so many of the unlikable conditions. I hope we can believe in each other, I hope we don't forever stay so pissy & snarky & short, I hope we can believe in trying for good things, moral & right things, even though there are challenges, even though it won't be perfect, even though less worthy & ideal words might also be captured in the archive. I vote with this guy: let's keep the lightcone.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thefz 3y ago
> Every person on the planet should have their own website Hm. > I’ve had my own website since I was 13. I will not tell you the domain name So what's the point.
- vidarh 3y ago
  There are many things I tell family which I will not tell random strangers on the internet.
seydor 3y ago
Just like we have schools and roads and public TV we should have a blog and an email for everyone on public infrastructure. Full of spam etc, but it should exists. and it would teach people about the problems of cybersecurity.
tureu92 3y ago
My ex is crazy stalker. Sometimes they would get drunk, look through my facebook and linkedin, and send me many nasty messages. Very annoying. Removing my online presence solved this. > Hey, I have a crazy story. I found this website today. There used to be this person who did this and that. And he’s our grand-grand-grand-father Imagine your class mates would discover, that your grand-grand-grand father owned slaves and they had pictures...
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Imagine my grand-grand-grand-father was a murderer. Am I guilty of his crime?
  - hobs 3y ago
    It depends, how much stolen loot did he bequeath to you?
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      The amount that can be proven to criminal trial standards (beyond a reasonable doubt) is exactly zero. In that case, am I guilty of his crime?
      - philipwhiuk 3y ago
        Equating lack of legal proof to morally defensible is laughable in any context.
      - code_runner 3y ago
        You seem to think that people will care about this proof or believe you in any way. Even if they do, they can still hate you because hating people on the internet is easy.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        Indeed. There is no avoiding people hating people for things they haven’t done and no amount or form of payment from the latter group will cause that to statement be falsified.
tux2bsd 3y ago
Who pays, if everyone is it WEF funded? You will have one website were your opinion must align with WEF and you will be happy. (just like Hacker News where the comments posted must align with dang's views, he's also known as "the algorithm").
- jprd 3y ago
  That's a weak snipe against someone who's only enforcing posted guidelines, and in doing so gives us this great outlet to have discussion about topics like these. dang != "The Man"
  - tux2bsd 3y ago
    [dead]
- Pannoniae 3y ago
  I dunno, but honestly so far, HN seems to be much more free speech and free debate-focused than any other social platform I've seen. Not sure where you got this from. (I have showdead on and 99% of what is deleted is just outright malicious or flame-y.)
  - tux2bsd 3y ago
    [dead]
jve 3y ago
A farmer could say that everyone should grow vegetables. Because, well, he is passionate about farming. It would actually make more sense than the proposed nonsense.
- kome 3y ago
  i fully agree that evryone should grow vegetables, and I am not a farmer. if you have a garden, even a small one, its so rewarding and interesting, and it develops attention
  - Broken_Hippo 3y ago
    You like doing a hobby: That doesn't mean that everyone should do the hobby.
  - therealdrag0 3y ago
    You could say this about everything though right? Everyone should jog because … everyone should do woodworking because … everyone should do yoga … everyone should go to church .. everyone should mentor kids … everyone should paint watercolors … everyone should be involved in politics … everyone should get a second uni degree …
    - kome 3y ago
      i agree!
    - jodrellblank 3y ago
      You don't think food deserves more consideration, higher priority, more special casing, than painting watercolours?
      - hot_gril 3y ago
        It does, but I can just go to the grocery store. Likewise, I don't have my own well for water. It'd be cool if I did, but that'd require moving first of all.
the_other 3y ago
> I’ve had my own website since I was 13. I will not tell you the domain name because it contained some cringe ass shit that’s still visible on archive.org. Doesn’t this counter the entire argument?
- brvsft 3y ago
  The funnier part is he thinks his website isn't full of "cringe ass shit" now.
  - bigblind 3y ago
    Cringe ass shit is in the eye of the beholder.
    - blueflow 3y ago
      https://eftegarie.com/drugs/ https://eftegarie.com/drugs/
      - landgenoot 3y ago
        Cultural difference. In the Netherlands, different types of drugs are reviewed on national television. (And banned from YouTube) https://www.npostart.nl/drugslab-afl-5-bastiaan-snuift-ketamine-special-k/07-10-2016/WO_BNN_6040405 https://www.npostart.nl/drugslab-afl-5-bastiaan-snuift-ketam...
        sdfghswe 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure the cringe part is the "as the tool of mind expansion" bit.
        sph 3y ago
        [flagged]
MissTake 3y ago
No. Just….no. There are any number of reasons why this is a terrible thought. Boomers and Gen Xers were brought up in a world without the Internet and we all survived just fine. Being told by someone who does something that we should all do the same thing, is a sign of emotional insecurity and narcissism. Free choice is great. I used to have a blog, however I no longer had time for it. Which is also totally fine. The older I get, the less I desire for my “public” me to do anything with Social media, leaving my various aliases (all different) to have that minimal outlet.
sgu999 3y ago
> Every person on the planet should have their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want. Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety. > Everyone should be writing in public. I never understood why this kind of injonctions for us to do things keep on coming up to the front page of HN. I understand that they make good titles, though. > “Hey, I have a crazy story. I found this website today. There used to be this person who did this and that. And he’s our grand-grand-grand-father!” I vaguely know that my grand-grand-grand-father was a farrier in one of the Napoleons' army and was a kind man, my children will vaguely know it as well. We'll all die and be forgotten, I think that's OK. There is also no guarantee that archive.org will survive a couple decades. But a notebook in the attic definitely will.
- stavros 3y ago
  > Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety. Ok, "every person on the planet should have access to basic hygiene and food safety, their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want."
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    I can't believe you went out on a limb like this. I've been assured that the fact that many people don't have access to basic water and food safety means that they shouldn't have a website either. I suppose you think they should have the vote, too? How can you give people the vote if they don't have indoor toilets?
    - stavros 3y ago
      Also, it doesn't make sense to try and solve any problems for anyone before the biggest problems are solved.
- edf13 3y ago
  > But a notebook in the attic definitely will Unless you move and lose it... or there is a house fire... or someone finds it and burns it... etc.
diffeomorphism 3y ago
> Every person should have a unique, publicly visible identifier. Also nobody would lie on the internet. Yeah, can't see how that could possibly go wrong or be misused or anything.
- wmeredith 3y ago
  People lie to each other’s faces all the time. This is a very naive perspective.
  - diffeomorphism 3y ago
    You missed the important part. Hoping that this won't be misused is very naive and dangerous. The part about lying is simply pointing out that most pages will be not even particularly interesting (e.g. see Xing profiles). Not sure what you understood it to mean.
blueflow 3y ago
Social status chasing person that maintains a personal brand thinks that everyone else should be chasing social status and maintain a personal brand. How about i sit in my garden instead, smoking a pipe, and not give a ** about whether others know and see me.
- blitzar 3y ago
  You should make daily content about siting in a garden, smoking a pipe, and not give a **
  - malfist 3y ago
    Why should they have that burden?
Zetobal 3y ago
I want a social network with domains as useraccounts. A little CMS interface UX/Ui more like twitter. Self hosted or by a hosting provider. There is one Mainsite that aggregates and caches the posts via RSS. Does the moderation against RSS Feeds and combines all RSS Feeds to one timeline. Private Messaging goes over email and useraccount links are just links to your own domain.
- zokier 3y ago
  You can have mastodon with your own domain?
  - Zetobal 3y ago
    But I don't want to host a server I just want to host my profile.
    - zokier 3y ago
      It is unfortunate that the mainline Mastodon server doesn't support proper multi-domain hosting/multi-tenancy, but that is just implementation detail rather than protocol issue. There are alternative servers that support multiple domains[1] and multi-domain support has been discussed also for Mastodon server[2] [1] for example https://jointakahe.org/ https://jointakahe.org/ [2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
    - kishmat 3y ago
      tumblr?
    - ruune 3y ago
      A "lite" instance of mastodon, which just hosts on profile should be possible though, it's just that noone has created it yet. Edit: I'm mistaken, because it's all just ActivityPub on the fediverse, of course there are projects making stuff lighter. I haven't found a dedicated single user project that's more than a demo, but stuff like Plemora seems light enough
Simulacra 3y ago
IF you can I think it's absolutely imperative that you own your name in a domain. I was very lucky in that my father purchased the com/net/org for my name when I was still in elementary school. It has been very helpful to me.
- astura 3y ago
  Why's it very helpful? I own myname.com and mylastname.com but so far it's been a complete waste of money and not at all helpful. Don't have anything to do with them.
samedru 3y ago
nice try google AI trining employe
zokier 3y ago
Its unfortunate that there is no sensible approach on DNS to facilitate everyone getting their own name. Having everyone attempting to register unique 2nd level domain from handful of TLDs is not really scalable approach, good memorable identifiers are going to run out fast. Based on quick search, currently there are <400M registered domain names across all TLDs. Growing that to order of ~10B will have challenges. What would be needed is either some kind of sensible hierarchy, or solve the problem like we did it with phones and just skip the name part completely and allocate a number to everyone instead. The discovery of everyones "internet number" could be delegated to social networking, both the old fashioned way (printed business cards) and more modern way ("facebook"). Interesting question is could we allocate IPv6 block to everyone and have it be somehow part of the solution. Maybe not directly, but it would be still something to ponder.
landgenoot 3y ago
I think the point the author tries to make, is that personal home pages are the form of how the world wide web was intended. Not censored profile pages run by the latest social network that becomes obsolete in the next decade.
verstandhandel 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rvcdbn 3y ago
sometimes I like to fantasize that over millions of years humanity will spread throughout the cosmos and when there are gazillions of humans (or our machine descendants) with unlimited time and resources there will be in some university somewhere an archeology department that specializes directly in each and every one of us. it’s simply an extrapolation of current trends in academia combined with a possible future where there are a billion people alive for each single one of us alive now. what do you want your personal archeology department to be like? personally i want a graham hancock style character to come up with wacky theories about me so i try to leave as many confusing bits of evidence as possible.
- otikik 3y ago
  Hello future university dedicated to myself. Here's my message to you: poo.
- heap_perms 3y ago
  That's a fascinating idea. (Also, personally I want full text search.)
muhblah 3y ago
That would generate a hell of a noise on the internet :D
j-bos 3y ago
A bit difficult if your employment contract claims ownership over all your IP, including domain names.
samwillis 3y ago
This post makes big broad statements but doesn't consider the nuance. I think they are somewhat correct, and the reality is most people do have a "website", it's a page on a social media site where they post stuff. The accessibility for everyone to have a publishing space is one of the most incredible advances in civilisation. However, the identity of the page, publishing under your own name is the thing that this post doesn't really cover. They mention not linking to their own old site as it has stuff that they did when they were a child. They really should have expanded on that. Archive.org is both an incredible resource but also a risk to people publishing things that they later regret. We have a right to change our mind, grow up and become a different person. Under GDPR there is the "right to be forgotten", we are early in the societal development of such rights in relation to the internet, and they can be abused by people removing thing the public should have a right to know. However I believe this is an important right, and because of it I believe the right to publish online under a pseudonym is important. So yes, almost everyone should have an online presence, and most do. But we should also have a right for it to disappear in time. I write online for myself now and the communities I contribute to, not for my children or their theoretical children. Certainly not some random slooth in future.
miguelbemartin 3y ago
I think the point is to own what you write and post on internet.
- ForestCritter 3y ago
  You don't own it, AI does
nathell 3y ago
You know what everyone should? Everyone should stop telling other people about what they should or should not do.
- joquarky 3y ago
  "Should" is a curse word. It curses an unaware person to feel shame or guilt if they choose not to do the prescription.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  "You are all individuals!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ
- activiation 3y ago
  Including you?
  - nathell 3y ago
    Yup, it’s tongue-in-cheek. But I do genuinely believe that if every sentence framed as „everyone should do X” were rewritten as „if everyone did X, then the world would change in the way of Y”, it would make its argument more meaningful and less violent.
dist-epoch 3y ago
They do. It's called Facebook/Instagram.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  It's an interesting challenge. Let's assume these accounts aren't just deleted, like Google started doing this year after accounts go inactive (what a lightcone horror show that is, ye monsters). But let's also assume Facebook accounts retain their security settings, and assume there's no massive change in behavior where people start making everything public again. What happens to these accounts then? Do we see great great great grandma, but all her posts are closed & locked to time? Maybe account inheritance is the way. You designate one person to take over your account. People become maintainers of the family tree, are the designated owner. You want to see the family tree? Talk to your cousin four times removed, he has the access keys to ~80 of your ancestors. And that other nephew has another ~40. Oh and your aunt has ~20.
- roydivision 3y ago
  Indeed, and that's worked out so well.
hnthrowaway0315 3y ago
I think this will help to create a digital legacy for everyone. Now the question is how to preserve all these data.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  Thank the stars for https://web.archive.org https://web.archive.org ! I'd love to see some more resilient options for hosting services past-death. Filling up a Hetzner account with $20k and letting it ride seems like a ridiculous plan but maybe that's the general idea. You'll also need some way to keep the DNS alive, which is a second major challenge. And your Let's Encrypt better keep working too, since so many web capabilities required HTTPS. Hopefully there's no CVEs that cause your online systems to be overrun by bots & get taken down. Back in the 90's everyone was all freaked out that "oh no, computer systems would keep changing so much over time, how will we ever be able to use old systems?" but today it feels like running an ancient apache httpd or ancient nginx would actually kind of be ok, if it weren't exploited. For a lot of people, just having a static http site they can zip up is probably a great option, if preservability across the ages is the goal. I do wish we had more planning & options for long-term hosting. Over time, it seems likely that interest in this will tick up. I'd love to see a Kuberentes co-op dedicated to ultra-affordable long-term hosting; it seems plausible that this kind of base infrastructure could port forward indefinitely, and having things like a thicker L7 gateway offers some significant security advantages versus containers or services being open to any traffic.
andyjohnson0 3y ago
Precondition: Every person on the planet should have their own permanently unique identifer
- Andrex 3y ago
  Something something "Mark of the Beast" etc. TBH though evangelicals should be pushing hard for it, theoretically they won't even be around for the fallout.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  No thank you.
code_runner 3y ago
Just let me opt out
ChildOfChaos 3y ago
Hmmm. I mean there are a number of issues I see with this for me personally. First of, there is a huge amount of things that I 'should' do or have, plenty of healthy habits, like going for a walk, exercise, reading, meditation, learning an instrument etc, the problem is everything is a time trade, I can only choose to do a few things. To me personally what would having a personal website really give me more than any of those things? Secondly, I don't think anything I would have to share would be that useful / interesting, I am not an expert in any field and if I just shared every random thought or idea, it would be such a niche mish mash of things, I don't see why it would be of interest to anyone. What I do is i capture any significant moment of the year on a trello board, then at the end of the year, I take that as a reminder and I write about that year, I go through all my photos on my phone from that year and pick out the relevant ones, I note what I watched, what I listed too, what I did etc and then I email that too myself in gmail with a flag of 'time capsule'. I also save and backup those particular writeups as PDF's outside of gmail for my personal record, this is great for me, but none of it needs to be public.
fidotron 3y ago
Tangentially in around 2006 I was loosely involved with a Nokia effort based on the concept that in the future everyone would have a blog. You would take pictures and share them, publish your location and so on. The fun begins when you realize they meant everyone host their blogs themselves . . . on their phones. There was a server project (called Raccoon iirc) and you could extend it with python scripts all on top of Symbian. It was beautifully mad but surprisingly educational. (I added GPS support and some usage of Bluetooth beacons when inside which had to be made up as there wasn’t a known standard at the time). It’s worth considering why exactly such an idea strikes us as so completely mad now.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  >It’s worth considering why exactly such an idea strikes us as so completely mad now. As one such esoteric thought: the "more attractive" a person was, the more frequent they would have to re-charge their cell phone (since it was acting as server). Some of the most-popular eTHOTs' phones would probably drain in just minutes (male or female, but particularly the latter).
- crazygringo 3y ago
  > It’s worth considering why exactly such an idea strikes us as so completely mad now. Because a web server that doesn't work when you're in a tunnel or on a flight or out of battery is one of the worst possible choices for a web server? And the additional drain on your battery. So "completely mad" still seems to fit. ;)
onion2k 3y ago
Alex Trebek: "Every person on the planet should have their own website" Me, hammering a buzzer as quickly as I can: "What is a phishing attacker's most deeply erotic wet dream?"
- jhbadger 3y ago
  No. Having everything centralized on things like Facebook and Instagram is far easier for the phishers. Nobody is going to spend the time to devise custom fishing attacks for individual websites. Attacking a platform that would let you get millions of accounts at once, that's their dream. And they have it.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    Nobody is going to spend the time to devise custom fishing attacks for individual websites. GPT prompt: "As a phishing attacker, find me websites where users have written about their school, their mother's maiden name, and where they currently work." GPT has access to Bing, and it's a really nice interface to unstructured data...
dkersten 3y ago
Why? What would I put on it? What would I blog about? Why do I want to broadcast to strangers? If it’s just to friends, I can send them an email or private message. Everyone who wants one should have their own, sure, but saying everyone should have one just because is silly.
hackeredje 3y ago
I wrote this also in the 90’s when I started my own site and my own blog as one of the first blogs. But 30 years later, I think there are many reasons why you would not want to do this. (I also stopped doing so after 15.000 posts or so). – you will grow and you will change opinions about things often 100 percent, the internet memory is however forever – you will enter in different careers and depending on the customer you would not want to be completely frank about every little thing you think or what your preferences are or what your experience is – in real life there are larger groups of persons with very different and often extreme viewpoints on either religious related, political related, culturally related etc viewpoints. This has grown and grown and has become a real life danger if you get picked up by some internet thread on some social media forum. This has changed from the 90’s where the internet was filled with intelligence and a hopeful view on the world. It is easy to fall into the trap of engaging in various discussions – you get children and often different social circles where you want to engage into blanco your children might not like at a certain stage you posting stuff (or pictures) (or opinions) – there are tons of frauds and criminal networks who gladly scrape everything you are from there not in the least for phishing So more or less: because there is also the real world with the 20% of people who are on the fraud/extreme religious/extreme political/other criminals/dumb side and there is real life social interaction and personal growth the following 30 years where once you write something it becomes stone
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  One of the main reasons I want to be better blogging than I am is because I want to see myself change, I want to change my opinions. I want to have processes to review what I wrote, and review how strongly I felt about it at the time, and update my stances. Personally I think the danger is far over-rated. We see the spectacular & loud exceptions to hundreds of millions of people actively posting & sharing & having fine undisturbed lives. Not everyone is going to have 15 minutes of being under attack in their life, but there's kind of a tacit assumption that having been online is all too likely to explode upon one's face at some point. And indeed, we do need to respect this possibility, make it a known idea, but this fear I think has way too much representation, & the opposing view, that it's very unlikely to ever be an issue I think is way undertold & undershared. As usual, subtle, nuance & complex gets sand-blasted away by something emotional & heart plucking & attention-grabbing. And in the aftermath, we have humanity being silent. Humanity loses a shared heritidge it could have, for understanding itself better. Because it was, in my humble opinion, unreasonably afraid someone might attack their words. Personally, I strongly feel that values of onlineness & openness & democracy each should make us push back a lot harder.
MadSudaca 3y ago
This assumes that everyone on the planet has something interesting to say.
dudul 3y ago
Considering how things written decades ago are weaponized to take down people nowadays, strong disagree. I absolutely do not want people to read the stupid things I would have written in my teens.
stronglikedan 3y ago
I'll never understand people who think everyone should be like them. Humanity is about diversity, and I think that is worth celebrating. I'm perfectly happy being a private person blending into the background and only writing anonymous posts on HN.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  To me, the idea is much more like: everyone is unique & special & should be celebrated, everyone has their own amazing insight & views of the world, and we make society & the future better when we can share ourselves. It can be a psuedo-nym, that's fine, but not sharing yourself seems like a waste of a life. And I think it misses opportunity to refine yourself, to ask yourself what your views are. Writing creates thought, writing creates perspective, and doing at least a good bit of it openly to the world - even if no one today is reading - is so valuable.
resuresu 3y ago
Everyone should host their own site from home. Otherwise there is no internet, its just everyone connecting to a handful of VPS providers.
mo_42 3y ago
> Every person on the planet should have their own website Seems a bit of a too narrow perspective. Many people just don’t have time and money to have their own website. Just because some thirteen-year-old has it doesn’t mean everyone should. Also, slightly contradictory that everyone should write in public but the person suggesting it does not show their website. So I suggest a slightly different title (and corresponding content): Every person on the planet should be able to have their own website
paxys 3y ago
Not everyone wants to host a website. Not everyone wants to write. Let people do their thing, and you do yours.
Brajeshwar 3y ago
I've a .com domain with my name since 2001, and another .com with my family name too. My first daughter also has her name with a .com. I used to write a lot everywhere, very publicly, and every other thing in between. Now, I write lot less, obfuscate a lot of information, that goes public. No, I don't think, everyone should have a domain. The Internet has become a minefield of entities and people who cannot stand to have good things, lot more than people who are good by default. Domains comes with a lot of responsibility to maintain it the right way. It is like maintaining a pet -- you need to tend to it to have it the way you want. Forget domains, most of the population do no have a clue how their emails are supposed to be and in fact, quite a lot of people think "gmail" is what email is.
heikkilevanto 3y ago
I have had my own web site since late 1990's. There is one publicly visible page that says something like "My web site is not even under construction yet. I put a page up when I have something I want to tell the world, not before!". There are a few non-public pages for my personal use. No blogs of any kind. That is the way I like it.
throwawayttu 3y ago
First and foremost all people should have fiber net to be able to watch movies in HD.
subjectsigma 3y ago
Some might call this a dereliction of free speech, but I don’t think all ~8 billion of us have something worthy to say, nor are all capable of writing with a public audience in mind. I tried blogging (as opposed to journaling) and then had the foresight to realize that 90% of what I wrote is either not interesting to others, not up to my own standards of quality, or could actively open me up to attack by Internet crazies (by revealing information about where I live, for example).
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  Your odds of finding something to say go way up if you start writing. Most people who do find something to say aren't going to start day 1 with absolutely grand things to say. My early livejournal experiences were pretty whatever, but even at that age I think I was getting a lot better each quarter, each year. Like much in life, focusing on specific outcomes often occludes the value of enjoying & focusing on the process. Your concerns about not meeting your own standards or not being interesting enough are, I think, representative of many fears & burdens of perfectionism many people carry; a natural dislike for not being as grand & great as we feel we are worthy of. Being raw & vulernable & what we are, and working & honing that: that's the exercise of becoming a mature, well lived adult. I love those who can find the courage to let that process unfold in public.
anigbrowl 3y ago
This was not worth submitting.
annoyingnoob 3y ago
Sounds like a security nightmare.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
I assumed this was a “social media of the future should focus on self hosted websites owned by the people themselves” angle. But it’s just to archive things for your ancestors
kwo 3y ago
> Every person on the planet should have their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want. Why? So randos on the Internet can make a snap judgement as to what kind of person I am? This seems like an intermediate step between no knowledge and a machine-readable personality profile. I enjoy reading blogs and visiting their websites but it’s not for everyone. You’re going to need to try harder to know people.
shultays 3y ago
geocities needs to be back
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  Use neocities.org.
thatguyagain 3y ago
This, along with the "websites was easier in 1996" is the most rehashed topics on HN
foo-bar-bat 3y ago
Seems very difficult to define "safely managed" or even "services" without projecting one society's values onto many others, which is always risky. Suggestions how to be objective about subjective topics?
vitruvian_man 3y ago
[flagged]
kwhitefoot 3y ago
Why?
ranprieur 3y ago
"Every person on the planet" is an exaggeration. But I've had my own website for 20 years, and it's much better than Facebook and Twitter.
ceving 3y ago
Everybody should be able to host his own stuff himself. But network address translation destroys such dreams.
mikewarot 3y ago
I embrace the hope side of this post. Every person should be free to have their own web site, their own public voice. If you have a grievance, you should be able to tell the world, and unless you're breaking the law AND societal norms doing so, nobody should be able to stop you. There's nothing that says everything has to be open to everyone. With capability based tokens, you could give access to select portions to friends, family, co-workers, etc. If you want to put all of your mp3s up for your own use, or to share with friends, but not accessible to others, why not? We should all have a voice in this new medium. Let's not shun this idea because the details aren't perfect. Our need to pick apart things helps us avoid future trouble when we're coding... but it's not always the most constructive response. That's the first problem I see with this post... our (HN et al) reaction to it. The other problem I see is technical, but also related to our views of the world... and that's security. Given our current views on operating systems, especially our support of systems with ambient authority, it is unwise to make a habit of just visiting any random website. This is why walled gardens are so popular. It's a technical issue that is widely seen to be a problem with either capitalism and markets, or some malign quirk of human nature, but the root cause is technical. Related Tangent about OS design: Imagine if there were no fuses or circuit breakers, and nobody had heard of them.... would you be willing to just randomly plug in a device from an unknown manufacturer? You could potentially burn your house down, and have everyone in your grid mad at you (because they no longer have power) as a result. You'd never do anything imaginative in that world with electricity. This is how I see our world with the internet and our crop of OSs that have ambient authority everywhere.
stan_kirdey 3y ago
it will quickly turn into an e-graveyard
tomcar288 3y ago
i wish there was a search engine that could find sites like that. there's so much value in people's personal experiences. For instance, i've searched for blog posts talking about individuals experience with setting up green houses and what temperatures they can keep overnight vs daytime. all the major engines refuse any attempt to find something that's not on a super high level domain or news site. most of the web is unreachable. sigh....
- nickstinemates 3y ago
  google: green house reddit That's where I'd start, anyway.
- dabbz 3y ago
  I mean, a list of every person and their thoughts with the ability to search is just Social Media. twitter, facebook, threads, discord, etc.
slmjkdbtl 3y ago
I understand and agree with the sentiment, which at its core is having a way to record your personal stories and thoughts, website / blog is definitely not the only way and probably not the most ideal way for a lot of people, and it's ok to not want to share ("should" is such a strong word). But no matter what medium people choose to record on, I agree there should be digital archives of everything.
nickstinemates 3y ago
Everyone on the planet who has a social media account has their "own website" and are putting themselves out in public, to some degree. I always thought that was the thing of social media. Lower barrier to entry so anyone can publish anything. From LiveJournal to Myspace to Youtube to Snap/Insta/Tiktok.
SergeAx 3y ago
no-god-please-no.gif
_8j50 3y ago
I feel almost opposite to this. Not only interner stuff like website but digital tech in general: avoiding these technologies should be a protected right for all humans. Simply existing should not be a reason to force a person to use a piece of digital technology, especially when that tech is connected to a network. If a person wants to raise their child in the woods, raising chicken and hunting deer and living off the land, it should be their protected right to do so.
nitwit005 3y ago
I'm glad someone who's a friend and advisor to many famous people took time out of their day to inform us of this (their prior post: https://eftegarie.com/famous/ https://eftegarie.com/famous/)
hot_gril 3y ago
If I want a journal, I can do that without also making it public to the world (future employers, lawyers, etc) and dealing with any associated hosting effort. And that's what I do. Sorry but my street smarts say no.
blueridge 3y ago
Every time the personal website thing comes up, I think about all the other times it has come up, and I think about these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19785236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19785236
edandersen 3y ago
Don't do this unless your job is literally to be an "influencer" or you are financially independent. "Build your own personal brand" is really bad advice if you don't want to have to be self employed. Nobody is going to hire someone with a public blog of opinions to a properly senior position.
barrysteve 3y ago
Okay. Map the Five Eyes database of 'all humans' to output public websites.

222 points by landgenoot 3y ago

Long ago I began writing (with a pen) into 'journals'/commonplace-books... into pre-bound books of empty pages. With never a worry about security or lost data (short of floods/fires/). With a potential lifetime of centuries. They could be OCRed I guess. But why? Except for 'notable' people, I've never run into a library where such things are accessible. How much of my family would share my old interests? Being 'immortalized on the web' seems ... a bit vain. I've often wished for a way to learn far more human details about great-grandparents (and earlier). Not just the "born, married, died" record. If they'd wanted it, for the self-selected few. So I imagine solarized tombstones. They could electronically play-back (and/or downloading) files (audio/video/text) I thought worth sharing. Frozen in crystals. For centuries. Like that 'library' in the 2002 remake of 'Time Machine'.

jslpc 3y ago

I agree with the general sentiment of the post, but I gravitate more towards e-ink displays, which has it's tradeoffs. Lugging around my Kindle Oasis is a chore, so I'll only bring it with me when I really plan on reading. That being said, I like the idea of just using your phone. I scroll through Twitter, HN, Reddit, etc. a good chunk of the day anyways, might as well spend that time reading something worthwhile instead. I also want to point out that I really like the look and feel of this website. I adore minimalist design for blogs, and my own website is similarly minimal but not quite the same. The author also touches on some subjects I find particularly interesting; investing, drugs, school (or lack thereof), etc.

ForestCritter 3y ago

...so that AI can suck them up...

Endurancee 3y ago

There should be a downvote button on Hackernews too.

dusted 3y ago

And in addition, everyone on the planet should have their own public routable IP address on their home Internet connection so they can host said website on their own hardware.

rldjbpin 3y ago

i believe the op's vision is already true: it is called social media.

moogly 3y ago

Humans already generate too much garbage; thinking everything is worth saving is pretty deluded in my book. I hope this comment doesn't end up on web.archive.org. Actually, the fact that I feel that is probable indication that I shouldn't even be posting it. I self-censor myself a lot these days: writing replies in a text editor and then deleting them instead of posting them online because I recognize the voicing of my opinions as rather pointless.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
The cost of carrying some words is so close to zero. Given the scale of data we do carry, it seems callous to me to begrudge people a couple megabytes of words in their life. Our ability to tell what is garbage & what has use seems incredibly poor. We just don't know. Who how & when do we take your mercenary plan into action to decide when to wipe things out? And we may glean great insight & wisdom from the aggregate, from being able to view historical sentiment. Efforts like the Google N-grams project can show incredible trends & patterns happening across time, and is just an incredibly simple first-level example of analysis.

hot_gril 3y ago

Nice try, FBI.

villgax 3y ago

It should be the other way around, if the government mandates an email address, a phone number & a house address then it should be made available to a citizen

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

There's a recognizable & real value to this call. It presents something hopeful: that values human spirit, that says we each have value and are unique & worthwhile. And it leaves the door open to the future; think of how hard scholars today go to find words from antiquity, what effort they take to understand the past: isn't it a noble idea to equip the past with a better view, to be able to see broadly into what the world is today? The world is so tired & frustrated & angsted up, over so many situations. The comments here almost universally come in extremely hot. They are short on possibility, actively disbelieve in what we have. I confess it's indeed reasonable to have some curmudgeonliness, to assume people are useless & uninteresting. But isn't an effort like this what would make the world better? If we thought laterally, if we both recognized that we have but one small voice but also cherished that light? To me, what's proposed here is the most basic inner-core of social contract: the recognition of human value, human dignity. These comments are amok with only the downsides of today. They are afraid of the couple scattering of examples of the weird that emerges at scale, the people harassed or bugged in real life. But there's so many hundreds of millions of people who are posting & sharing & blogging just fine. These comments disdain people & their discard their worth, without pausing to reflect on what gems in the rough might emerge. No one takes a long view, and asks how humanity might be different if we thought long, if we made a long context part of our existence. These attitudes engender the short term mercenary small view of exstence, they promote the havoc & irrelevance that they themselves disdain. There's so many interesting fractal possibilities & growths we could make towards this kind of idea. The costs have never been lower to keep & preserve. The prompt, of writing for the long, for the world: that calling I think would change us, would help us beget something closer to a smart & sensible noosphere, that can care, that escapes the traps of negativity & turmoil-driven attention hounding, that would help us break free of so many of the unlikable conditions. I hope we can believe in each other, I hope we don't forever stay so pissy & snarky & short, I hope we can believe in trying for good things, moral & right things, even though there are challenges, even though it won't be perfect, even though less worthy & ideal words might also be captured in the archive. I vote with this guy: let's keep the lightcone.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thefz 3y ago

> Every person on the planet should have their own website Hm. > I’ve had my own website since I was 13. I will not tell you the domain name So what's the point.

vidarh 3y ago
There are many things I tell family which I will not tell random strangers on the internet.

seydor 3y ago

Just like we have schools and roads and public TV we should have a blog and an email for everyone on public infrastructure. Full of spam etc, but it should exists. and it would teach people about the problems of cybersecurity.

tureu92 3y ago

My ex is crazy stalker. Sometimes they would get drunk, look through my facebook and linkedin, and send me many nasty messages. Very annoying. Removing my online presence solved this. > Hey, I have a crazy story. I found this website today. There used to be this person who did this and that. And he’s our grand-grand-grand-father Imagine your class mates would discover, that your grand-grand-grand father owned slaves and they had pictures...

sokoloff 3y ago
Imagine my grand-grand-grand-father was a murderer. Am I guilty of his crime?
- hobs 3y ago
  It depends, how much stolen loot did he bequeath to you?
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    The amount that can be proven to criminal trial standards (beyond a reasonable doubt) is exactly zero. In that case, am I guilty of his crime?
    - philipwhiuk 3y ago
      Equating lack of legal proof to morally defensible is laughable in any context.
    - code_runner 3y ago
      You seem to think that people will care about this proof or believe you in any way. Even if they do, they can still hate you because hating people on the internet is easy.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        Indeed. There is no avoiding people hating people for things they haven’t done and no amount or form of payment from the latter group will cause that to statement be falsified.

tux2bsd 3y ago

Who pays, if everyone is it WEF funded? You will have one website were your opinion must align with WEF and you will be happy. (just like Hacker News where the comments posted must align with dang's views, he's also known as "the algorithm").

jprd 3y ago
That's a weak snipe against someone who's only enforcing posted guidelines, and in doing so gives us this great outlet to have discussion about topics like these. dang != "The Man"
- tux2bsd 3y ago
  [dead]
Pannoniae 3y ago
I dunno, but honestly so far, HN seems to be much more free speech and free debate-focused than any other social platform I've seen. Not sure where you got this from. (I have showdead on and 99% of what is deleted is just outright malicious or flame-y.)
- tux2bsd 3y ago
  [dead]

jve 3y ago

A farmer could say that everyone should grow vegetables. Because, well, he is passionate about farming. It would actually make more sense than the proposed nonsense.

kome 3y ago
i fully agree that evryone should grow vegetables, and I am not a farmer. if you have a garden, even a small one, its so rewarding and interesting, and it develops attention
- Broken_Hippo 3y ago
  You like doing a hobby: That doesn't mean that everyone should do the hobby.
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  You could say this about everything though right? Everyone should jog because … everyone should do woodworking because … everyone should do yoga … everyone should go to church .. everyone should mentor kids … everyone should paint watercolors … everyone should be involved in politics … everyone should get a second uni degree …
  - kome 3y ago
    i agree!
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    You don't think food deserves more consideration, higher priority, more special casing, than painting watercolours?
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      It does, but I can just go to the grocery store. Likewise, I don't have my own well for water. It'd be cool if I did, but that'd require moving first of all.

the_other 3y ago

> I’ve had my own website since I was 13. I will not tell you the domain name because it contained some cringe ass shit that’s still visible on archive.org. Doesn’t this counter the entire argument?

brvsft 3y ago
The funnier part is he thinks his website isn't full of "cringe ass shit" now.
- bigblind 3y ago
  Cringe ass shit is in the eye of the beholder.
  - blueflow 3y ago
    https://eftegarie.com/drugs/ https://eftegarie.com/drugs/
    - landgenoot 3y ago
      Cultural difference. In the Netherlands, different types of drugs are reviewed on national television. (And banned from YouTube) https://www.npostart.nl/drugslab-afl-5-bastiaan-snuift-ketamine-special-k/07-10-2016/WO_BNN_6040405 https://www.npostart.nl/drugslab-afl-5-bastiaan-snuift-ketam...
      - sdfghswe 3y ago
        I'm pretty sure the cringe part is the "as the tool of mind expansion" bit.
        sph 3y ago
        [flagged]

MissTake 3y ago

No. Just….no. There are any number of reasons why this is a terrible thought. Boomers and Gen Xers were brought up in a world without the Internet and we all survived just fine. Being told by someone who does something that we should all do the same thing, is a sign of emotional insecurity and narcissism. Free choice is great. I used to have a blog, however I no longer had time for it. Which is also totally fine. The older I get, the less I desire for my “public” me to do anything with Social media, leaving my various aliases (all different) to have that minimal outlet.

sgu999 3y ago

> Every person on the planet should have their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want. Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety. > Everyone should be writing in public. I never understood why this kind of injonctions for us to do things keep on coming up to the front page of HN. I understand that they make good titles, though. > “Hey, I have a crazy story. I found this website today. There used to be this person who did this and that. And he’s our grand-grand-grand-father!” I vaguely know that my grand-grand-grand-father was a farrier in one of the Napoleons' army and was a kind man, my children will vaguely know it as well. We'll all die and be forgotten, I think that's OK. There is also no guarantee that archive.org will survive a couple decades. But a notebook in the attic definitely will.

stavros 3y ago
> Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety. Ok, "every person on the planet should have access to basic hygiene and food safety, their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want."
- pessimizer 3y ago
  I can't believe you went out on a limb like this. I've been assured that the fact that many people don't have access to basic water and food safety means that they shouldn't have a website either. I suppose you think they should have the vote, too? How can you give people the vote if they don't have indoor toilets?
  - stavros 3y ago
    Also, it doesn't make sense to try and solve any problems for anyone before the biggest problems are solved.
edf13 3y ago
> But a notebook in the attic definitely will Unless you move and lose it... or there is a house fire... or someone finds it and burns it... etc.

diffeomorphism 3y ago

> Every person should have a unique, publicly visible identifier. Also nobody would lie on the internet. Yeah, can't see how that could possibly go wrong or be misused or anything.

wmeredith 3y ago
People lie to each other’s faces all the time. This is a very naive perspective.
- diffeomorphism 3y ago
  You missed the important part. Hoping that this won't be misused is very naive and dangerous. The part about lying is simply pointing out that most pages will be not even particularly interesting (e.g. see Xing profiles). Not sure what you understood it to mean.

blueflow 3y ago

Social status chasing person that maintains a personal brand thinks that everyone else should be chasing social status and maintain a personal brand. How about i sit in my garden instead, smoking a pipe, and not give a ** about whether others know and see me.

blitzar 3y ago
You should make daily content about siting in a garden, smoking a pipe, and not give a **
- malfist 3y ago
  Why should they have that burden?

Zetobal 3y ago

I want a social network with domains as useraccounts. A little CMS interface UX/Ui more like twitter. Self hosted or by a hosting provider. There is one Mainsite that aggregates and caches the posts via RSS. Does the moderation against RSS Feeds and combines all RSS Feeds to one timeline. Private Messaging goes over email and useraccount links are just links to your own domain.

zokier 3y ago
You can have mastodon with your own domain?
- Zetobal 3y ago
  But I don't want to host a server I just want to host my profile.
  - zokier 3y ago
    It is unfortunate that the mainline Mastodon server doesn't support proper multi-domain hosting/multi-tenancy, but that is just implementation detail rather than protocol issue. There are alternative servers that support multiple domains[1] and multi-domain support has been discussed also for Mastodon server[2] [1] for example https://jointakahe.org/ https://jointakahe.org/ [2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
  - kishmat 3y ago
    tumblr?
  - ruune 3y ago
    A "lite" instance of mastodon, which just hosts on profile should be possible though, it's just that noone has created it yet. Edit: I'm mistaken, because it's all just ActivityPub on the fediverse, of course there are projects making stuff lighter. I haven't found a dedicated single user project that's more than a demo, but stuff like Plemora seems light enough

Simulacra 3y ago

IF you can I think it's absolutely imperative that you own your name in a domain. I was very lucky in that my father purchased the com/net/org for my name when I was still in elementary school. It has been very helpful to me.

astura 3y ago
Why's it very helpful? I own myname.com and mylastname.com but so far it's been a complete waste of money and not at all helpful. Don't have anything to do with them.

samedru 3y ago

nice try google AI trining employe

zokier 3y ago

Its unfortunate that there is no sensible approach on DNS to facilitate everyone getting their own name. Having everyone attempting to register unique 2nd level domain from handful of TLDs is not really scalable approach, good memorable identifiers are going to run out fast. Based on quick search, currently there are <400M registered domain names across all TLDs. Growing that to order of ~10B will have challenges. What would be needed is either some kind of sensible hierarchy, or solve the problem like we did it with phones and just skip the name part completely and allocate a number to everyone instead. The discovery of everyones "internet number" could be delegated to social networking, both the old fashioned way (printed business cards) and more modern way ("facebook"). Interesting question is could we allocate IPv6 block to everyone and have it be somehow part of the solution. Maybe not directly, but it would be still something to ponder.

landgenoot 3y ago

I think the point the author tries to make, is that personal home pages are the form of how the world wide web was intended. Not censored profile pages run by the latest social network that becomes obsolete in the next decade.

verstandhandel 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rvcdbn 3y ago

sometimes I like to fantasize that over millions of years humanity will spread throughout the cosmos and when there are gazillions of humans (or our machine descendants) with unlimited time and resources there will be in some university somewhere an archeology department that specializes directly in each and every one of us. it’s simply an extrapolation of current trends in academia combined with a possible future where there are a billion people alive for each single one of us alive now. what do you want your personal archeology department to be like? personally i want a graham hancock style character to come up with wacky theories about me so i try to leave as many confusing bits of evidence as possible.

otikik 3y ago
Hello future university dedicated to myself. Here's my message to you: poo.
heap_perms 3y ago
That's a fascinating idea. (Also, personally I want full text search.)

muhblah 3y ago

That would generate a hell of a noise on the internet :D

j-bos 3y ago

A bit difficult if your employment contract claims ownership over all your IP, including domain names.

samwillis 3y ago

This post makes big broad statements but doesn't consider the nuance. I think they are somewhat correct, and the reality is most people do have a "website", it's a page on a social media site where they post stuff. The accessibility for everyone to have a publishing space is one of the most incredible advances in civilisation. However, the identity of the page, publishing under your own name is the thing that this post doesn't really cover. They mention not linking to their own old site as it has stuff that they did when they were a child. They really should have expanded on that. Archive.org is both an incredible resource but also a risk to people publishing things that they later regret. We have a right to change our mind, grow up and become a different person. Under GDPR there is the "right to be forgotten", we are early in the societal development of such rights in relation to the internet, and they can be abused by people removing thing the public should have a right to know. However I believe this is an important right, and because of it I believe the right to publish online under a pseudonym is important. So yes, almost everyone should have an online presence, and most do. But we should also have a right for it to disappear in time. I write online for myself now and the communities I contribute to, not for my children or their theoretical children. Certainly not some random slooth in future.

miguelbemartin 3y ago

I think the point is to own what you write and post on internet.

ForestCritter 3y ago
You don't own it, AI does

nathell 3y ago

You know what everyone should? Everyone should stop telling other people about what they should or should not do.

joquarky 3y ago
"Should" is a curse word. It curses an unaware person to feel shame or guilt if they choose not to do the prescription.
HeckFeck 3y ago
"You are all individuals!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbzSif78qQ
activiation 3y ago
Including you?
- nathell 3y ago
  Yup, it’s tongue-in-cheek. But I do genuinely believe that if every sentence framed as „everyone should do X” were rewritten as „if everyone did X, then the world would change in the way of Y”, it would make its argument more meaningful and less violent.

dist-epoch 3y ago

They do. It's called Facebook/Instagram.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
It's an interesting challenge. Let's assume these accounts aren't just deleted, like Google started doing this year after accounts go inactive (what a lightcone horror show that is, ye monsters). But let's also assume Facebook accounts retain their security settings, and assume there's no massive change in behavior where people start making everything public again. What happens to these accounts then? Do we see great great great grandma, but all her posts are closed & locked to time? Maybe account inheritance is the way. You designate one person to take over your account. People become maintainers of the family tree, are the designated owner. You want to see the family tree? Talk to your cousin four times removed, he has the access keys to ~80 of your ancestors. And that other nephew has another ~40. Oh and your aunt has ~20.
roydivision 3y ago
Indeed, and that's worked out so well.

hnthrowaway0315 3y ago

I think this will help to create a digital legacy for everyone. Now the question is how to preserve all these data.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Thank the stars for https://web.archive.org https://web.archive.org ! I'd love to see some more resilient options for hosting services past-death. Filling up a Hetzner account with $20k and letting it ride seems like a ridiculous plan but maybe that's the general idea. You'll also need some way to keep the DNS alive, which is a second major challenge. And your Let's Encrypt better keep working too, since so many web capabilities required HTTPS. Hopefully there's no CVEs that cause your online systems to be overrun by bots & get taken down. Back in the 90's everyone was all freaked out that "oh no, computer systems would keep changing so much over time, how will we ever be able to use old systems?" but today it feels like running an ancient apache httpd or ancient nginx would actually kind of be ok, if it weren't exploited. For a lot of people, just having a static http site they can zip up is probably a great option, if preservability across the ages is the goal. I do wish we had more planning & options for long-term hosting. Over time, it seems likely that interest in this will tick up. I'd love to see a Kuberentes co-op dedicated to ultra-affordable long-term hosting; it seems plausible that this kind of base infrastructure could port forward indefinitely, and having things like a thicker L7 gateway offers some significant security advantages versus containers or services being open to any traffic.

andyjohnson0 3y ago

Precondition: Every person on the planet should have their own permanently unique identifer

Andrex 3y ago
Something something "Mark of the Beast" etc. TBH though evangelicals should be pushing hard for it, theoretically they won't even be around for the fallout.
kwhitefoot 3y ago
No thank you.

code_runner 3y ago

Just let me opt out

ChildOfChaos 3y ago

Hmmm. I mean there are a number of issues I see with this for me personally. First of, there is a huge amount of things that I 'should' do or have, plenty of healthy habits, like going for a walk, exercise, reading, meditation, learning an instrument etc, the problem is everything is a time trade, I can only choose to do a few things. To me personally what would having a personal website really give me more than any of those things? Secondly, I don't think anything I would have to share would be that useful / interesting, I am not an expert in any field and if I just shared every random thought or idea, it would be such a niche mish mash of things, I don't see why it would be of interest to anyone. What I do is i capture any significant moment of the year on a trello board, then at the end of the year, I take that as a reminder and I write about that year, I go through all my photos on my phone from that year and pick out the relevant ones, I note what I watched, what I listed too, what I did etc and then I email that too myself in gmail with a flag of 'time capsule'. I also save and backup those particular writeups as PDF's outside of gmail for my personal record, this is great for me, but none of it needs to be public.

fidotron 3y ago

Tangentially in around 2006 I was loosely involved with a Nokia effort based on the concept that in the future everyone would have a blog. You would take pictures and share them, publish your location and so on. The fun begins when you realize they meant everyone host their blogs themselves . . . on their phones. There was a server project (called Raccoon iirc) and you could extend it with python scripts all on top of Symbian. It was beautifully mad but surprisingly educational. (I added GPS support and some usage of Bluetooth beacons when inside which had to be made up as there wasn’t a known standard at the time). It’s worth considering why exactly such an idea strikes us as so completely mad now.

ProllyInfamous 3y ago
>It’s worth considering why exactly such an idea strikes us as so completely mad now. As one such esoteric thought: the "more attractive" a person was, the more frequent they would have to re-charge their cell phone (since it was acting as server). Some of the most-popular eTHOTs' phones would probably drain in just minutes (male or female, but particularly the latter).
crazygringo 3y ago
> It’s worth considering why exactly such an idea strikes us as so completely mad now. Because a web server that doesn't work when you're in a tunnel or on a flight or out of battery is one of the worst possible choices for a web server? And the additional drain on your battery. So "completely mad" still seems to fit. ;)

onion2k 3y ago

Alex Trebek: "Every person on the planet should have their own website" Me, hammering a buzzer as quickly as I can: "What is a phishing attacker's most deeply erotic wet dream?"

jhbadger 3y ago
No. Having everything centralized on things like Facebook and Instagram is far easier for the phishers. Nobody is going to spend the time to devise custom fishing attacks for individual websites. Attacking a platform that would let you get millions of accounts at once, that's their dream. And they have it.
- onion2k 3y ago
  Nobody is going to spend the time to devise custom fishing attacks for individual websites. GPT prompt: "As a phishing attacker, find me websites where users have written about their school, their mother's maiden name, and where they currently work." GPT has access to Bing, and it's a really nice interface to unstructured data...

dkersten 3y ago

Why? What would I put on it? What would I blog about? Why do I want to broadcast to strangers? If it’s just to friends, I can send them an email or private message. Everyone who wants one should have their own, sure, but saying everyone should have one just because is silly.

hackeredje 3y ago

I wrote this also in the 90’s when I started my own site and my own blog as one of the first blogs. But 30 years later, I think there are many reasons why you would not want to do this. (I also stopped doing so after 15.000 posts or so). – you will grow and you will change opinions about things often 100 percent, the internet memory is however forever – you will enter in different careers and depending on the customer you would not want to be completely frank about every little thing you think or what your preferences are or what your experience is – in real life there are larger groups of persons with very different and often extreme viewpoints on either religious related, political related, culturally related etc viewpoints. This has grown and grown and has become a real life danger if you get picked up by some internet thread on some social media forum. This has changed from the 90’s where the internet was filled with intelligence and a hopeful view on the world. It is easy to fall into the trap of engaging in various discussions – you get children and often different social circles where you want to engage into blanco your children might not like at a certain stage you posting stuff (or pictures) (or opinions) – there are tons of frauds and criminal networks who gladly scrape everything you are from there not in the least for phishing So more or less: because there is also the real world with the 20% of people who are on the fraud/extreme religious/extreme political/other criminals/dumb side and there is real life social interaction and personal growth the following 30 years where once you write something it becomes stone

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
One of the main reasons I want to be better blogging than I am is because I want to see myself change, I want to change my opinions. I want to have processes to review what I wrote, and review how strongly I felt about it at the time, and update my stances. Personally I think the danger is far over-rated. We see the spectacular & loud exceptions to hundreds of millions of people actively posting & sharing & having fine undisturbed lives. Not everyone is going to have 15 minutes of being under attack in their life, but there's kind of a tacit assumption that having been online is all too likely to explode upon one's face at some point. And indeed, we do need to respect this possibility, make it a known idea, but this fear I think has way too much representation, & the opposing view, that it's very unlikely to ever be an issue I think is way undertold & undershared. As usual, subtle, nuance & complex gets sand-blasted away by something emotional & heart plucking & attention-grabbing. And in the aftermath, we have humanity being silent. Humanity loses a shared heritidge it could have, for understanding itself better. Because it was, in my humble opinion, unreasonably afraid someone might attack their words. Personally, I strongly feel that values of onlineness & openness & democracy each should make us push back a lot harder.

MadSudaca 3y ago

This assumes that everyone on the planet has something interesting to say.

dudul 3y ago

Considering how things written decades ago are weaponized to take down people nowadays, strong disagree. I absolutely do not want people to read the stupid things I would have written in my teens.

stronglikedan 3y ago

I'll never understand people who think everyone should be like them. Humanity is about diversity, and I think that is worth celebrating. I'm perfectly happy being a private person blending into the background and only writing anonymous posts on HN.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
To me, the idea is much more like: everyone is unique & special & should be celebrated, everyone has their own amazing insight & views of the world, and we make society & the future better when we can share ourselves. It can be a psuedo-nym, that's fine, but not sharing yourself seems like a waste of a life. And I think it misses opportunity to refine yourself, to ask yourself what your views are. Writing creates thought, writing creates perspective, and doing at least a good bit of it openly to the world - even if no one today is reading - is so valuable.

resuresu 3y ago

Everyone should host their own site from home. Otherwise there is no internet, its just everyone connecting to a handful of VPS providers.

mo_42 3y ago

> Every person on the planet should have their own website Seems a bit of a too narrow perspective. Many people just don’t have time and money to have their own website. Just because some thirteen-year-old has it doesn’t mean everyone should. Also, slightly contradictory that everyone should write in public but the person suggesting it does not show their website. So I suggest a slightly different title (and corresponding content): Every person on the planet should be able to have their own website

paxys 3y ago

Not everyone wants to host a website. Not everyone wants to write. Let people do their thing, and you do yours.

Brajeshwar 3y ago

I've a .com domain with my name since 2001, and another .com with my family name too. My first daughter also has her name with a .com. I used to write a lot everywhere, very publicly, and every other thing in between. Now, I write lot less, obfuscate a lot of information, that goes public. No, I don't think, everyone should have a domain. The Internet has become a minefield of entities and people who cannot stand to have good things, lot more than people who are good by default. Domains comes with a lot of responsibility to maintain it the right way. It is like maintaining a pet -- you need to tend to it to have it the way you want. Forget domains, most of the population do no have a clue how their emails are supposed to be and in fact, quite a lot of people think "gmail" is what email is.

heikkilevanto 3y ago

I have had my own web site since late 1990's. There is one publicly visible page that says something like "My web site is not even under construction yet. I put a page up when I have something I want to tell the world, not before!". There are a few non-public pages for my personal use. No blogs of any kind. That is the way I like it.

throwawayttu 3y ago

First and foremost all people should have fiber net to be able to watch movies in HD.

subjectsigma 3y ago

Some might call this a dereliction of free speech, but I don’t think all ~8 billion of us have something worthy to say, nor are all capable of writing with a public audience in mind. I tried blogging (as opposed to journaling) and then had the foresight to realize that 90% of what I wrote is either not interesting to others, not up to my own standards of quality, or could actively open me up to attack by Internet crazies (by revealing information about where I live, for example).

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Your odds of finding something to say go way up if you start writing. Most people who do find something to say aren't going to start day 1 with absolutely grand things to say. My early livejournal experiences were pretty whatever, but even at that age I think I was getting a lot better each quarter, each year. Like much in life, focusing on specific outcomes often occludes the value of enjoying & focusing on the process. Your concerns about not meeting your own standards or not being interesting enough are, I think, representative of many fears & burdens of perfectionism many people carry; a natural dislike for not being as grand & great as we feel we are worthy of. Being raw & vulernable & what we are, and working & honing that: that's the exercise of becoming a mature, well lived adult. I love those who can find the courage to let that process unfold in public.

anigbrowl 3y ago

This was not worth submitting.

annoyingnoob 3y ago

Sounds like a security nightmare.

barbariangrunge 3y ago

I assumed this was a “social media of the future should focus on self hosted websites owned by the people themselves” angle. But it’s just to archive things for your ancestors

kwo 3y ago

> Every person on the planet should have their own website, on their own domain name, and blog about whatever they want. Why? So randos on the Internet can make a snap judgement as to what kind of person I am? This seems like an intermediate step between no knowledge and a machine-readable personality profile. I enjoy reading blogs and visiting their websites but it’s not for everyone. You’re going to need to try harder to know people.

shultays 3y ago

geocities needs to be back

kwhitefoot 3y ago
Use neocities.org.

thatguyagain 3y ago

This, along with the "websites was easier in 1996" is the most rehashed topics on HN

foo-bar-bat 3y ago

Seems very difficult to define "safely managed" or even "services" without projecting one society's values onto many others, which is always risky. Suggestions how to be objective about subjective topics?

vitruvian_man 3y ago

[flagged]

kwhitefoot 3y ago

Why?

ranprieur 3y ago

"Every person on the planet" is an exaggeration. But I've had my own website for 20 years, and it's much better than Facebook and Twitter.

ceving 3y ago

Everybody should be able to host his own stuff himself. But network address translation destroys such dreams.

mikewarot 3y ago

I embrace the hope side of this post. Every person should be free to have their own web site, their own public voice. If you have a grievance, you should be able to tell the world, and unless you're breaking the law AND societal norms doing so, nobody should be able to stop you. There's nothing that says everything has to be open to everyone. With capability based tokens, you could give access to select portions to friends, family, co-workers, etc. If you want to put all of your mp3s up for your own use, or to share with friends, but not accessible to others, why not? We should all have a voice in this new medium. Let's not shun this idea because the details aren't perfect. Our need to pick apart things helps us avoid future trouble when we're coding... but it's not always the most constructive response. That's the first problem I see with this post... our (HN et al) reaction to it. The other problem I see is technical, but also related to our views of the world... and that's security. Given our current views on operating systems, especially our support of systems with ambient authority, it is unwise to make a habit of just visiting any random website. This is why walled gardens are so popular. It's a technical issue that is widely seen to be a problem with either capitalism and markets, or some malign quirk of human nature, but the root cause is technical. Related Tangent about OS design: Imagine if there were no fuses or circuit breakers, and nobody had heard of them.... would you be willing to just randomly plug in a device from an unknown manufacturer? You could potentially burn your house down, and have everyone in your grid mad at you (because they no longer have power) as a result. You'd never do anything imaginative in that world with electricity. This is how I see our world with the internet and our crop of OSs that have ambient authority everywhere.

stan_kirdey 3y ago

it will quickly turn into an e-graveyard

tomcar288 3y ago

i wish there was a search engine that could find sites like that. there's so much value in people's personal experiences. For instance, i've searched for blog posts talking about individuals experience with setting up green houses and what temperatures they can keep overnight vs daytime. all the major engines refuse any attempt to find something that's not on a super high level domain or news site. most of the web is unreachable. sigh....

nickstinemates 3y ago
google: green house reddit That's where I'd start, anyway.
dabbz 3y ago
I mean, a list of every person and their thoughts with the ability to search is just Social Media. twitter, facebook, threads, discord, etc.

slmjkdbtl 3y ago

I understand and agree with the sentiment, which at its core is having a way to record your personal stories and thoughts, website / blog is definitely not the only way and probably not the most ideal way for a lot of people, and it's ok to not want to share ("should" is such a strong word). But no matter what medium people choose to record on, I agree there should be digital archives of everything.

nickstinemates 3y ago

Everyone on the planet who has a social media account has their "own website" and are putting themselves out in public, to some degree. I always thought that was the thing of social media. Lower barrier to entry so anyone can publish anything. From LiveJournal to Myspace to Youtube to Snap/Insta/Tiktok.

SergeAx 3y ago

no-god-please-no.gif

_8j50 3y ago

I feel almost opposite to this. Not only interner stuff like website but digital tech in general: avoiding these technologies should be a protected right for all humans. Simply existing should not be a reason to force a person to use a piece of digital technology, especially when that tech is connected to a network. If a person wants to raise their child in the woods, raising chicken and hunting deer and living off the land, it should be their protected right to do so.

nitwit005 3y ago

I'm glad someone who's a friend and advisor to many famous people took time out of their day to inform us of this (their prior post: https://eftegarie.com/famous/ https://eftegarie.com/famous/)

hot_gril 3y ago

If I want a journal, I can do that without also making it public to the world (future employers, lawyers, etc) and dealing with any associated hosting effort. And that's what I do. Sorry but my street smarts say no.

blueridge 3y ago

Every time the personal website thing comes up, I think about all the other times it has come up, and I think about these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19785236 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19785236

edandersen 3y ago

Don't do this unless your job is literally to be an "influencer" or you are financially independent. "Build your own personal brand" is really bad advice if you don't want to have to be self employed. Nobody is going to hire someone with a public blog of opinions to a properly senior position.

barrysteve 3y ago

Okay. Map the Five Eyes database of 'all humans' to output public websites.