5 ms·

> It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. The IndieWeb doesn't need to "take off" to be v

> It's like saying that gardening hasn't taken off because most people buy their vegetables at the supermarket. The IndieWeb doesn't need to "take off" to be valuable to those who participate in it. I have a different viewpoint on this. The non-independent web which is largely controlled by faceless corporations has never been bigger or more able to hurt the average person. Someone who gets locked out of their Google account today is at risk of getting their entire life turned upside down -- and they don't even get to argue their case via phone call! Thus, fostering an independent web and making sure more and more people can build their presence outside of the BigCorp stranglehold can be said to be more like growing vegetables in wartime, similar to a victory garden [1]. It's more of a necessity than something that's great to have. Sure, no one from the IndieWeb organization signed up for this mission. But they, along with things like RSS, Matrix, Mastodon, and the Bluesky protocol are the nearest glimpses we have of an open web that exists outside regulation-capturing trillion-dollar corporations. So I would entreat their leaders to be a bit more forgiving if critics express frustration at the difficult user interfaces. ----- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

rollcat 2y ago
I think the biggest obstacle are the "getting started", and then "actually owning it" parts. I registered my domain with Gandi (who have also initially hosted my email), got a VM from Hetzner, set me up some nginx, and I was good for a while. Then Gandi dropped their "no bullshit" motto and wanted €48/y to renew a €12 domain; I transferred it away to MrDomain, plugged my email into iCloud, and since I didn't actually need a VM, Netlify is now my web host (with Hugo as the blog engine). Now I want to move away from non-EU companies and facing another crisis. The fact that you can do it at all is a welcome sign for individuals who desire digital independence. But every step of the way, I needed sysadmin expertise, and also now have to shop around for a whole bunch of new providers. What is a DNS record? Why can't I set up CNAME on a naked domain? Why is it so difficult to find out the correct IMAP/SMTP settings? Why do I need a PC, a text editor, and git to publish a link with a 20-word comment? Why is $PROVIDER integrating with Github only, while git has always been non-centralised? There has to be a better way. There are countless providers that will offer you a DNS+email+web hosting package, but there will always be shortcomings (e.g. running a blog engine that is not Wordpress; Wix is impossibly slow and clunky; etc), and moving to a different provider is pure pain even for experts. And then, self-hosting even the most basic apps, like an RSS reader, bookmarks, calendar/TODO? No providers will get you the full package, you have to resort to a VM of some kind and do the expert-level twiddling, likely including setting up Postgres somewhere along the way. Assuming you have the knowledge: cryptominers destroyed the free tier on anything that needs compute; it doesn't matter if you need 30min of CPU and 100MB of transfer per month, you will end up with a bunch of extra bills and several moving parts. You could argue that gardening also requires knowledge and maintenance. But free software and open protocols are about reusing existing building blocks. You never ever had to write an email client. I want the experience of installing stuff from the App Store. I want the experience of changing web browsers, where the new one just imports bookmarks and history from what you've been using to date. Even if it's adversarial compatibility. It should not matter if I'm a noob or if I've been a sysadmin for the past 10 years. Even if the latter is the case, I still value my free time, and don't want to take my work back home.
- 1dom 2y ago
  What's your point here? Doing things yourself is hard. Doing things in a way that reuses other people's effort should be slightly easier. Doing something that that is defined by "doing it all yourself", like growing your own veg, or, running/hosting your own website is going to be very hard. I feel this is one of the biggest single things I have learned with age (specifically in my 30s) that has actually changed my life in a way that I believe younger me couldn't/wouldn't be able to grasp: there is no easy way to do things yourself, but that is the value in doing things yourself. Do things for yourself, not because they are easy... > There has to be a better way. There is another way. But any other way is either going to involve someone else doing part of it for you, or it's equally as hard.
- bluebarbet 2y ago
  Completely agree with your general gist. As someone who built websites in the 1990s, I too am amazed by how hard it still is to do something as ostensibly simple as publish text. My conclusion is this: DNS and hosting are just inappropriate overkill for individuals. There's the setup hurdle, then the ongoing security and maintenance of software, and finally the problem that hosting is just fragile, with no internal inertia - if you stop paying, your site goes away or gets squatted. All this just to have one's own domain? In the end, for any site, the only link that will survive is the one on the Internet Archive. I now tend to the view that domains and hosting and software maintenance are best left to organizations. Individuals should instead pool their resources and publish on shared platforms. There's no reason these need be corporate. The fediverse, for instance, is giving us new publishing options almost every day.
- vladms 2y ago
  I think expectations not to pay for things are one of the reasons people give up control to companies - you complain about 48 eur and not having a free tier, but you also mention you want stuff. I decided for myself to use less free services. Either I find them useful and I should pay for them (and demand improvements), or I shouldn't expect that stuff is "provided" to me without some downsides (ads, etc.). I am grateful that so many people made things more accessible and easier by building all the open source and free software! That's an immense work already, not recognized enough, and (probably) put off a bit by people that demand stuff without wanting to learn and understand the details.
Barrin92 2y ago
>The non-independent web which is largely controlled by faceless corporations has never been bigger or more able to hurt the average person I disagree with this one pretty strongly because it's important to consider it in relation to the amount of internet users. The early web was less corporate largely just due to its small size. If you take into account the number of users I'd argue that the corporate web peaked about 10 - 15 years ago, ever since then there's been a gradual shift towards more diversity. If you grew up in the AOL messenger and Yahoo news era not only was it corporate, but there was one corporation for like, everything. In 2010 you had effectively 1 social network, Facebook. Internet Explorer had a marketshare of 95% at its peak. Today it's still heavily commercial but that's not the same as corporate. There's a lot of alternatives now, Signal, Telegram, niche decentralized alternatives, direct consumer facing creator focused platforms like substack, patreon, onlyfans etc. Even Amazon to me seems way less central and with more alternatives than it did 5-7 years ago. Netflix has more competitors, as a software developer you have a much healthier open source and linux ecosystem, and so on. You have to have some pretty heavy rose tinted glasses on if you think creators, devs or endusers had more choice on the internet 20 years ago than they do now.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  Twenty years ago, the norm was to email your personal "social network" using a completely standardized and decentralized protocol. Twenty years ago, the norm was to maintain a bookmark list of personally maintained websites you might visit in your online time, using a completely standardized protocol distributed across hosts ranging from home PC's to closet racks to countless disparate ISP's, universities, and hosting providers. Twenty years ago, the norm was to have topical conversations with strangers using completely standardized protocols using decentralized or federated networks (NNTP and IRC). Twenty years ago, the norm was to trade with and organize within your community on minimalist bulletin boards that took no fees and had almost no rules. Twenty years ago, the norm was still that you kept most of your purchases in your local economy, but when you chose to remove money from your local economy (a certain kind of travesty, now become the norm), you did so with nearly unmediated relationship with far away merchants, with only a few points in fees being absorbed by agencies situated in between. Twenty years ago, the norm was that when you bought digital media, you received a commodity copy of it that you could duplicate and access and re-encode as you saw fit. Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media and share it freely with others using numerous clever protocols to overcome bandwidth and accountability concerns, all decentralized. True, twenty years ago, you did not get to have trivial access to trivial interactions with celebrities. You did not get endless streams of trivial headlines about trivial things. You did not get to drone out to endless autoplay of trivial videos. You did not get to monetize your own trivialities so easily. Frankly, having been around for twenty years and then quite a few more, I have no idea what you're talking about in your comment.
ozim 2y ago
I did an attempt to grow some vegetables for „war time”. It is pretty much useless. Amounts are too much to consume at once and not enough to consume for longer periods. Putting it into jars is an option but then cost goes up as you need to boil loads of water. Then as mentioned amount to sustain family of 3 for whole year I would have to spend way too much time in it, not even starting on possible diseases that could wipe out crop. Statistics also show that people in the cities eat much more vegetables than people in the country side - if you exclude potatoes. I don’t want to eat potatoes only. Exactly the same with self hosting or even running my own blog on VPS - it is nice as a side hobby. But if I have to prevent any DDoS that is already too much to handle and I am DevOps by trade and we buy anti DDoS services. Unless I am forced to do gardening for survival or I wouldn’t have anything else to do with my time there is no upside for maintaining garden or maintaining self hosted stuff, just a nerdy fantasy because it all takes too much time and people have much more things to do in life. Nerdy fantasy is having all kinds of vegetables freshly picked - war time reality is eating old potatoes from the cellar.
- n4r9 2y ago
  > Amounts are too much to consume at once and not enough to consume for longer periods. This depends on what you grow. Squashes and root vegetables can last for months in a cool dark location at home.
- ViscountPenguin 2y ago
  This might be climate dependent. Here in the subtropics, I've found it relatively easy to get the majority of our fruits and veggies from our backyard, with things like papayas and panama berries producing year round. In temperate climates you'll have more difficulty though.
  - dudefeliciano 2y ago
    I think there are many upsides of maintaining a garden: you learn how to grow different crops (that you wouldn’t if you didn’t grow a garden) and how to combat disease, you get fresh air, vitamin d and an occasion to wind down, you get to eat your own veggies which taste far better than store bought for the simple fact that you grew them yourself. Maybe it doesn’t make you self sustainable in case of war, but it sure gives you the basics over someone who has never grown anything…
zombot 2y ago
Goalpost moved error. It's not the job of the indie web to repair the damage that bungling regulators and lawmakers cause with their laissez-faire attitude towards the megacorps. Cleanig up this deeply corrupt system cannot be done by the indie web, however much we wish it could.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
alex_abt 2y ago
I would join you but I'm busy making sure everyone is drinking out of paper straws to save the environment.

rollcat 2y ago

I think the biggest obstacle are the "getting started", and then "actually owning it" parts. I registered my domain with Gandi (who have also initially hosted my email), got a VM from Hetzner, set me up some nginx, and I was good for a while. Then Gandi dropped their "no bullshit" motto and wanted €48/y to renew a €12 domain; I transferred it away to MrDomain, plugged my email into iCloud, and since I didn't actually need a VM, Netlify is now my web host (with Hugo as the blog engine). Now I want to move away from non-EU companies and facing another crisis. The fact that you can do it at all is a welcome sign for individuals who desire digital independence. But every step of the way, I needed sysadmin expertise, and also now have to shop around for a whole bunch of new providers. What is a DNS record? Why can't I set up CNAME on a naked domain? Why is it so difficult to find out the correct IMAP/SMTP settings? Why do I need a PC, a text editor, and git to publish a link with a 20-word comment? Why is $PROVIDER integrating with Github only, while git has always been non-centralised? There has to be a better way. There are countless providers that will offer you a DNS+email+web hosting package, but there will always be shortcomings (e.g. running a blog engine that is not Wordpress; Wix is impossibly slow and clunky; etc), and moving to a different provider is pure pain even for experts. And then, self-hosting even the most basic apps, like an RSS reader, bookmarks, calendar/TODO? No providers will get you the full package, you have to resort to a VM of some kind and do the expert-level twiddling, likely including setting up Postgres somewhere along the way. Assuming you have the knowledge: cryptominers destroyed the free tier on anything that needs compute; it doesn't matter if you need 30min of CPU and 100MB of transfer per month, you will end up with a bunch of extra bills and several moving parts. You could argue that gardening also requires knowledge and maintenance. But free software and open protocols are about reusing existing building blocks. You never ever had to write an email client. I want the experience of installing stuff from the App Store. I want the experience of changing web browsers, where the new one just imports bookmarks and history from what you've been using to date. Even if it's adversarial compatibility. It should not matter if I'm a noob or if I've been a sysadmin for the past 10 years. Even if the latter is the case, I still value my free time, and don't want to take my work back home.

1dom 2y ago
What's your point here? Doing things yourself is hard. Doing things in a way that reuses other people's effort should be slightly easier. Doing something that that is defined by "doing it all yourself", like growing your own veg, or, running/hosting your own website is going to be very hard. I feel this is one of the biggest single things I have learned with age (specifically in my 30s) that has actually changed my life in a way that I believe younger me couldn't/wouldn't be able to grasp: there is no easy way to do things yourself, but that is the value in doing things yourself. Do things for yourself, not because they are easy... > There has to be a better way. There is another way. But any other way is either going to involve someone else doing part of it for you, or it's equally as hard.
bluebarbet 2y ago
Completely agree with your general gist. As someone who built websites in the 1990s, I too am amazed by how hard it still is to do something as ostensibly simple as publish text. My conclusion is this: DNS and hosting are just inappropriate overkill for individuals. There's the setup hurdle, then the ongoing security and maintenance of software, and finally the problem that hosting is just fragile, with no internal inertia - if you stop paying, your site goes away or gets squatted. All this just to have one's own domain? In the end, for any site, the only link that will survive is the one on the Internet Archive. I now tend to the view that domains and hosting and software maintenance are best left to organizations. Individuals should instead pool their resources and publish on shared platforms. There's no reason these need be corporate. The fediverse, for instance, is giving us new publishing options almost every day.
vladms 2y ago
I think expectations not to pay for things are one of the reasons people give up control to companies - you complain about 48 eur and not having a free tier, but you also mention you want stuff. I decided for myself to use less free services. Either I find them useful and I should pay for them (and demand improvements), or I shouldn't expect that stuff is "provided" to me without some downsides (ads, etc.). I am grateful that so many people made things more accessible and easier by building all the open source and free software! That's an immense work already, not recognized enough, and (probably) put off a bit by people that demand stuff without wanting to learn and understand the details.

Barrin92 2y ago

>The non-independent web which is largely controlled by faceless corporations has never been bigger or more able to hurt the average person I disagree with this one pretty strongly because it's important to consider it in relation to the amount of internet users. The early web was less corporate largely just due to its small size. If you take into account the number of users I'd argue that the corporate web peaked about 10 - 15 years ago, ever since then there's been a gradual shift towards more diversity. If you grew up in the AOL messenger and Yahoo news era not only was it corporate, but there was one corporation for like, everything. In 2010 you had effectively 1 social network, Facebook. Internet Explorer had a marketshare of 95% at its peak. Today it's still heavily commercial but that's not the same as corporate. There's a lot of alternatives now, Signal, Telegram, niche decentralized alternatives, direct consumer facing creator focused platforms like substack, patreon, onlyfans etc. Even Amazon to me seems way less central and with more alternatives than it did 5-7 years ago. Netflix has more competitors, as a software developer you have a much healthier open source and linux ecosystem, and so on. You have to have some pretty heavy rose tinted glasses on if you think creators, devs or endusers had more choice on the internet 20 years ago than they do now.

swatcoder 2y ago
Twenty years ago, the norm was to email your personal "social network" using a completely standardized and decentralized protocol. Twenty years ago, the norm was to maintain a bookmark list of personally maintained websites you might visit in your online time, using a completely standardized protocol distributed across hosts ranging from home PC's to closet racks to countless disparate ISP's, universities, and hosting providers. Twenty years ago, the norm was to have topical conversations with strangers using completely standardized protocols using decentralized or federated networks (NNTP and IRC). Twenty years ago, the norm was to trade with and organize within your community on minimalist bulletin boards that took no fees and had almost no rules. Twenty years ago, the norm was still that you kept most of your purchases in your local economy, but when you chose to remove money from your local economy (a certain kind of travesty, now become the norm), you did so with nearly unmediated relationship with far away merchants, with only a few points in fees being absorbed by agencies situated in between. Twenty years ago, the norm was that when you bought digital media, you received a commodity copy of it that you could duplicate and access and re-encode as you saw fit. Twenty years ago, the (illicit) norm was to digitize your own physical media and share it freely with others using numerous clever protocols to overcome bandwidth and accountability concerns, all decentralized. True, twenty years ago, you did not get to have trivial access to trivial interactions with celebrities. You did not get endless streams of trivial headlines about trivial things. You did not get to drone out to endless autoplay of trivial videos. You did not get to monetize your own trivialities so easily. Frankly, having been around for twenty years and then quite a few more, I have no idea what you're talking about in your comment.

ozim 2y ago

I did an attempt to grow some vegetables for „war time”. It is pretty much useless. Amounts are too much to consume at once and not enough to consume for longer periods. Putting it into jars is an option but then cost goes up as you need to boil loads of water. Then as mentioned amount to sustain family of 3 for whole year I would have to spend way too much time in it, not even starting on possible diseases that could wipe out crop. Statistics also show that people in the cities eat much more vegetables than people in the country side - if you exclude potatoes. I don’t want to eat potatoes only. Exactly the same with self hosting or even running my own blog on VPS - it is nice as a side hobby. But if I have to prevent any DDoS that is already too much to handle and I am DevOps by trade and we buy anti DDoS services. Unless I am forced to do gardening for survival or I wouldn’t have anything else to do with my time there is no upside for maintaining garden or maintaining self hosted stuff, just a nerdy fantasy because it all takes too much time and people have much more things to do in life. Nerdy fantasy is having all kinds of vegetables freshly picked - war time reality is eating old potatoes from the cellar.

n4r9 2y ago
> Amounts are too much to consume at once and not enough to consume for longer periods. This depends on what you grow. Squashes and root vegetables can last for months in a cool dark location at home.
ViscountPenguin 2y ago
This might be climate dependent. Here in the subtropics, I've found it relatively easy to get the majority of our fruits and veggies from our backyard, with things like papayas and panama berries producing year round. In temperate climates you'll have more difficulty though.
- dudefeliciano 2y ago
  I think there are many upsides of maintaining a garden: you learn how to grow different crops (that you wouldn’t if you didn’t grow a garden) and how to combat disease, you get fresh air, vitamin d and an occasion to wind down, you get to eat your own veggies which taste far better than store bought for the simple fact that you grew them yourself. Maybe it doesn’t make you self sustainable in case of war, but it sure gives you the basics over someone who has never grown anything…

zombot 2y ago

Goalpost moved error. It's not the job of the indie web to repair the damage that bungling regulators and lawmakers cause with their laissez-faire attitude towards the megacorps. Cleanig up this deeply corrupt system cannot be done by the indie web, however much we wish it could.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

alex_abt 2y ago

I would join you but I'm busy making sure everyone is drinking out of paper straws to save the environment.