3 ms·

It seems like your premise here is that the web is only for "professionals". It is not. It is for everyone. HTTP/3 certainly agrees with you though.

acdha 2y ago
I wouldn’t set the bar for “professional” so low but it’s really just incongruous to say that it’s somehow easy and democratic to take care of running a server, registering a domain, setting up DNS, and creating some kind of web application but following high-quality documentation to add an extra couple of lines of configuration magically transforms it into a major barrier. In most cases, you don’t even need to do it yourself since most hosting companies have some kind of recipe which covers most of the work.
- superkuh 2y ago
  Your assumption that all that is needed does explain some things. Almost none of that is required and indeed, most of it would make things worse. Running a webserver is as simple as "apt install nginx", forwarding ports 80/443 on your router and saving a index.html to the webroot directory. HTML and files in directories live forever. And there's no need for a domain, DNS, or especially an "application". Just drag and drop myphoto.jpg to ~/www/ in your GUI file manager and you're ready to send the link, http://my.ip.is.here/myphoto.jpg http://my.ip.is.here/myphoto.jpg to friends. And it'll last forever with no security worries. nginx remote exploits are once a decade, if that. Sure you might have to re-link if your IP changes but that's not a problem. Sure you site will be inaccessible sometimes if your computer is off, but you're not sharing files to friends during that time so it's fine. The requirements of business use cases just don't apply. It's not "serious".
  - acdha 2y ago
    So you never need to patch that server? Your nginx, OpenSSL, etc. never need updates? Seriously, this is just embarrassing. If it’s too hard for you to add a couple lines of config to enable Let’s Encrypt (apt will get you Apache w/mod_md or Caddy, too), it’s also too hard to run the rest of the server - and neither are that hard.

acdha 2y ago

I wouldn’t set the bar for “professional” so low but it’s really just incongruous to say that it’s somehow easy and democratic to take care of running a server, registering a domain, setting up DNS, and creating some kind of web application but following high-quality documentation to add an extra couple of lines of configuration magically transforms it into a major barrier. In most cases, you don’t even need to do it yourself since most hosting companies have some kind of recipe which covers most of the work.

superkuh 2y ago
Your assumption that all that is needed does explain some things. Almost none of that is required and indeed, most of it would make things worse. Running a webserver is as simple as "apt install nginx", forwarding ports 80/443 on your router and saving a index.html to the webroot directory. HTML and files in directories live forever. And there's no need for a domain, DNS, or especially an "application". Just drag and drop myphoto.jpg to ~/www/ in your GUI file manager and you're ready to send the link, http://my.ip.is.here/myphoto.jpg http://my.ip.is.here/myphoto.jpg to friends. And it'll last forever with no security worries. nginx remote exploits are once a decade, if that. Sure you might have to re-link if your IP changes but that's not a problem. Sure you site will be inaccessible sometimes if your computer is off, but you're not sharing files to friends during that time so it's fine. The requirements of business use cases just don't apply. It's not "serious".
- acdha 2y ago
  So you never need to patch that server? Your nginx, OpenSSL, etc. never need updates? Seriously, this is just embarrassing. If it’s too hard for you to add a couple lines of config to enable Let’s Encrypt (apt will get you Apache w/mod_md or Caddy, too), it’s also too hard to run the rest of the server - and neither are that hard.