10 ms·

A simple web we own

312 points by speckx 9mo ago

thefounder 9mo ago
I think the main issue with federated apps is the identity and moderation. Without identity verification is hard to moderate so you end up with closed systems where some big CO does the moderation at an acceptable level
- sowbug 9mo ago
  This is only half a thought. The current wave of AI agents is diminishing the value of identity as a DDOS or content-moderation signal. The formula until now included bot = bad, but unless your service wants to exclude everyone using OpenClaw and friends, that's no longer a valid heuristic. If identity is no longer a strong signal, then the internet must move away from CAPTCHAs and logins and reputation, and focus more on the proposed content or action instead. Which might not be so bad. After all, if I read a thought-provoking, original, enriching comment on HN, do I really care if it was actually written by a dog? We might finally be getting close to https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/. One more half thought: what if the solution to the Sybil problem is deciding that it's not a problem? Go ahead and spin up your bot network, join the party. If we can design systems that assign zero value to uniqueness and require originality or creativity for a contribution to matter, then successful Sybil "attacks" are no longer attacks, but free work donated by the attacker.
  - caconym_ 9mo ago
    > if I read a thought-provoking, original, enriching comment on HN, do I really care if it was actually written by a dog? I would rather just read the thought as it was originally expressed by a human somewhere in the AI's training data, rather than a version of it that's been laundered through AI and deployed according to the separate, hidden intent of the AI's operator.
ted537 9mo ago
Unfortunately the transparency of the IP stack means that unless u want whole world to know where u live via one DNS query, you'd need to use a service to proxy back to urself. And if ur paying for remote compute anyways, you could probably just host ur stuff there. Any machine that can proxy traffic back to you is just as capable of hosting ur static stuff there.
- nickorlow 9mo ago
  It only gives a pretty rough estimation, not a street address. I don't think many self-hosters have run into issue w/ this.
hellcow 9mo ago
> I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing online...
- graypegg 9mo ago
  I think the point the author is trying to make is more so about these mini networks on their own LAN, which their family uses. (And maybe dreaming of a neighbourhood utility LAN as a middle ground between LAN in your house and WAN as just a trunk to a big ISP node) The full quote is - A Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a 3 gigabyte hard drive setup as a "server" (makes this site available on my home network[9]) - I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access (I have the least expensive subscription for this) ... [9] I can view my personal web on my home network from my phone, tablet and computers. So can the rest of my family.
  - redkoala 9mo ago
    The equivalent self contained home server exists today in the homelab community, either with Mac Minis or NAS systems running Unraid or TrueNAS with community apps. Add in Tailscale on top for remote access. What’s needed is a lot of work on the software front to make it much easier, with interoperable standards. Self-hosted WYSYWIG options as easy to use as the social media tools for photos and writing and social posts. Ability to run distributed chatroom style instances with tracker like discoverability to replace Discord. Built in backup options with easy offsite backup replication.
  - squeefers 9mo ago
    hes like these off-gridders that use iphones.... larping some kind of self-sufficieny, whilst being firmly tied to industrialised society and completely unwilling to sever the link
    - RattlesnakeJake 9mo ago
      At least they can comfort themselves with the fact that their iPhones support Lockdown Mode XD
born-jre 9mo ago
I kind of resonate with a lot of things in the article. My own personal view is that we should make hosting stuff vastly simpler; that's one of the goals of my project, at least my attempt (self promo) https://github.com/blue-monads/potatoverse https://github.com/blue-monads/potatoverse
- nine_k 9mo ago
  Potatoverse is a great name :)) BTW do you remember Sandstorm.io?
  - born-jre 9mo ago
    Thanks cap'n-py. Yeah, I love Sandstorm. My goal is to be more portable, lighter, and a 'download binary and run' kind of tool. There are also other attempts around what I call the 'packaging with Docker' approach (Coolify, etc.), which are more attempts at packaging existing apps. But my approach—the platform—gives a bunch of stuff you can use to make apps faster, but you have to bend to its idiosyncrasies. In turn, you do not need a beefy home lab to run it (not everyone is a tinkerer). It's more focused, so it will be easier for the end user running it than for the developer.
- inigyou 9mo ago
  [dead]
podgorniy 9mo ago
Co-ownership of the hardware is a social not technical problem. Think of questions of trust, responsibility, who has power, who and how contributes, how decisions are made, etc, etc
selridge 9mo ago
Who is this we, kemosabe?
zer00eyz 9mo ago
> Simple to use software that empowers us to both read and write hypertext4 and syndicated content Simple to use software... this would be grand! > Raspberry Pi OS (a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU Linux) Is this simple? I would contend that it is not. Why do I tell people "buy apple products" as a matter of course? Because they have decent security, great ease of use, and support is an Apple Store away. They still manage to screw things up. Look at the emergence of docker as an install method for software on linux. We sing the praises of this as means of software distribution and installation... and yet it's functionally un-usable by normal (read: non technical) people. Usability needs to make a comeback.
- otabdeveloper4 9mo ago
  > great ease of use Apple stuff is a nightmare of dark patterns and user-hostile idiocy. Maybe it's easy if you have Stockholm syndrome and have internalized all the arcane gestures, icons and bug avoidance patterns. The average normie has no clue, though. (This is borne from experience, I have like 8 iPhones in the immediate family among children and seniors.)
canadiantim 9mo ago
I personally think the trend we witnessed with clawdbot where people ran to buy mac minis or other ways of self hosting ai agents is going to be a huge wind in the sails for generally hosting things at home.
liveoneggs 9mo ago
This guy has been around long enough to know about NNTP, which is the original distributed people-focused web, but talks about how HTML is some kind of barrier to entry. HTTP requires always-on + always-discoverable infrastructure It's all over the place.
disease 9mo ago
As the author of a content management system I made with the idea to democratize internet content creation, I've had a lot of the same thoughts that the author brings up here. I've always thought that even learning Markdown was a bridge to far when it comes to empowering non-technical users however. In my experience it's best just to supply tooling similar to Word where you have buttons for things like lists and bolding. Using Markdown as the format itself is something I will agree with though. Another thought I had is that local AI could most definitely play a part in helping non-technical users create the kind of content they want. If your CMS gives you a GPT-like chat window that allows a non-technical user to restyle the page as they like, or do things like make mass edits - then I think that is something that could help some of the issues mentioned here.
- tvink 9mo ago
  It's definitely an approach. I do think in true democratization of the internet, teaching people some tech is inevitable. We just can't have equal access if we retain the classes of user and maker as completely distinct.
- chasd00 9mo ago
  > supply tooling similar to Word just fyi, Word still has Save As -> Web Page (.htm). For a blog post or newsletter type thing i bet it works just fine.
  - graypegg 9mo ago
    I wonder if some part of the FrontPage [0] codebase lives on in there... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage
    - jodrellblank 9mo ago
      https://openlivewriter.com/ https://openlivewriter.com/ lives on
- mb2100 9mo ago
sagaro 9mo ago
I agree with the point that big companies have persuaded people that only they can offer ease of publishing content. most of my friends publish on Facebook, X, Instagram etc. I have tried to get them to publish markdown sites using GitHub pages, but the pain of having to git commit and do it via desktop was the blocker. So I recently made them a mobile app called JekyllPress [0] with which they can publish their posts similar to WordPress mobile app. And now a bunch of them regularly publish on GitHub pages. I think with more tools to simplify the publishing process, more people will start using GitHub pages (my app still requires some painful onboarding like creating a repo, enabling GitHub pages and getting PAT, no oAuth as I don't have any server). [0] https://www.gapp.in/projects/jekyllpress/ https://www.gapp.in/projects/jekyllpress/
- righthand 9mo ago
  Isn’t publishing on Github Pages still posting to a corporate centrally owned entity and not a solution to the problem described?
  - sagaro 9mo ago
    But it is portable. It is essentially markdown files. You can download your repo, compile the Jekyll to static pages and publish them anywhere. When you publish to Facebook, WordPress etc you can't easily get your stuff out. You will have to process them even if they allow you to download your content as a zip folder. The images will be broken. Links between pages won't work etc.
    - righthand 9mo ago
      Facebook provides a data export service which gives you a zip file with a web version of all your content. I’m not sure what the difference is then between that and a Github hosted repository of all your content as a webpage.
      - sagaro 9mo ago
        The main difference is the data structure and the intent of the export. Facebook's tool is built for data compliance and local offline viewing, not web portability. If you open that Facebook zip file, the HTML version is just a massive dump of proprietary markup. To actually migrate those posts to a new blog, you'd have to write a custom scraper just to extract your own text from their messy div tags. If you use their JSON export, you still have to write a custom script to parse their specific schema and remap all the hardcoded local image paths so they work on a live server. With a Github Pages repo, your content is already sitting there as raw, standardized Markdown. You can just take that folder of .md files, drop it into Hugo, 11ty, or any other static site generator, and it just works. No scraping or data-wrangling required.
IFC_LLC 9mo ago
I mean, you do have a point, and I'll quite agree with it. The only way of monetizing your writing is to use Substack or Medium, or whatever. Yet your approach is appallingly low on the other side of the spectrum. I've been in IT for the past 25 years. I have yet to see a non-IT person who knows what dedicated IP is. If you are not publishing it on the internet, then what's the point? I've seen plenty of companies where the owner just had a read-only shared drive, where people can rummage thru a pack of PDFs. This' was all fine with that. You have to understand, manage and work with the complexities of the tools, and offer tools quite enough for the task. It's alright to offer what you do to an engineer who has a spare Pi and a couple of days to kill. But it's quite useless for anyone else to adopt.
RajT88 9mo ago
The only way we own a web of our own is to develop much more of a culture of leaving smallish machines online all the time. Imagine something like Tor or BitTorrent, but everyone has a very simple way of running their own node for content hosting. That always-on device? To get critical mass, instead of just the nerds, you'd need it to ship with devices which are always-on, like routers/gateways, smart TV's. Then you're back to being at the mercy of centralized companies who also don't love patching their security vulnerabilities.
- jejeyyy77 9mo ago
  if only we all had a little device that was always on and and connected….
  - amarant 9mo ago
    If I'm reading the implication right, you're having a pretty terrible idea. Glossing over what running a server would do to your battery, it would never work because of the routing issues you'll run into. With IPv6 it would theoretically be possible, but currently with ipv4 and NATs everywhere, your website would almost never be reachable, even with fancy workarounds like dynDNS
    - ericd 9mo ago
      Heh could also be your router?
    - koalacongregate 9mo ago
      Can you explain more about the routing issues? Because I've also been thinking about how practically everyone has an old smartphone with a broken screen in a drawer somewhere, and whether we could encourage people to use that for self-hosting. If you leave it at home, always plugged in and on your own network, I don't know how it would be different than any other device running a server?
    - intrikate 9mo ago
      No good reason to do this, but I would imagine you could set up a site-to-site VPN with Wireguard (or hell, Tailscale) from your phone to a VPS, and have people hit the public server which routes back over your tunnel to your phone for access to the data. I'm almost curious enough to try for myself.
cousin_it 9mo ago
It's not about ease of publishing. The issue is what people get in return for publishing. Until you can design a platform that gives top creators as much money+attention as commercial platforms, you'll see a drain of top creators and their viewers to commercial platforms.
- munificent 9mo ago
  100%. You don't even need to give people money. It's about attention and feedback. People post photos on Instagram and status updates on Facebook because their friends will see it there and give it a thumbs up. A couple of decades ago, I spent a lot of time laboriously building a website for scratch for my photography. It was objectively a really nice site. I had my own domain, hosted it on a VPS, and put a ton of work into the layout and design. But none of my friends ever thought to go there. I could see by my web stats that every now and then a random stranger would find the site... but they had no easy way of connecting with me and acknowledging that they saw it. If they put a lot of effort in, they could find my email address and email, but that's a hell of a lot harder than just clicking a little thumbs up button next to a Facebook post or filling a comment in the comment box. Uploading photos to my site was about as rewarding as printing them out and throwing them in the trash. I thought about adding support for that to my site, but then it opens the whole can of worms around user-generated content, abuse, moderation, etc. Eventually, I moved to Flickr, which at the time was an actual community that gave me that connection. Then Flickr fizzled out. Now, on the rare times I bother to process a photo... I just upload it to Facebook because that's where (a dwindling subset of) my friends are. It's not about the content. It's about the human connection. A CMS won't fix that.
  - tclancy 9mo ago
    >It's about attention and feedback. Feedback maybe, but blogging didn't start for attention. That's something that got bolted on by a nasty virus we as humans tend to be carriers of. I don't think feedback was even an inspiration for the initial bloggers.
    - munificent 9mo ago
themacguffinman 9mo ago
I think this mostly misses the biggest reason why writers would choose big tech platforms or other big platforms: discovery and aggregation. If you want to speak to be heard and not just for its own sake, then you want to go where the people are hanging out and where they could actually find your content. This is like talking about how book authors don't need Amazon when you have a printer and glue at home.
istillwritecode 9mo ago
I like how it's not mobile friendly.
moffers 9mo ago
It’s not really covered, but p2p technology combined with every phone in the world (and a little wishful thinking) could make for some neat applications.
Jaauthor 9mo ago
I don't wanna brag but this is pretty much the premise behind my soon-to-be-published scifi novel: https://inkican.com/mesh-middle-grade-scifi-thriller/ https://inkican.com/mesh-middle-grade-scifi-thriller/
octoclaw 9mo ago
The real barrier was never technical. It was convenience and discovery. Running a Pi at home is trivial for anyone on HN, but the moment you want people to actually find your stuff, you need DNS, a stable IP, and some way to not get buried under the noise. Tailscale and similar overlay networks have made the "accessible from anywhere" part way easier than it used to be. The missing piece is still discovery. RSS was the closest we got to decentralized discovery, and we collectively let it rot. Maybe it's time to bring it back properly.
- jeromechoo 9mo ago
  What does “bringing (RSS) back properly” entail in your eyes? It’s still alive. Many sites still use it. Many people still subscribe to those sites. RSS reader apps are still being created to this day.
  - naasking 9mo ago
    RSS directories perhaps, instead of relying on search engines.
    - jeromechoo 9mo ago
      There are a few. Try this one: https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/
- tsumnia 9mo ago
  > The missing piece is still discovery. I think the key issue here is that Attention is a temporal construct, meaning discovery is often tied to "being the first thing that comes to people's minds" which means SEO, reverse engineering the ranking algorithms, and constantly having to manage an "online persona". Note none of those things contribute to the actual work you're doing, just your "marketing department" (and whatever time/financial "budget" you intend to give it). MrBeast figured out the YouTube algorithm - post early and often. Is that how we exist on modern Internet when every website/thumbnail is engineered by a team to maximize clickthrough rates? I agree RSS is useful, but it faces the same scalability issues if everyone starts filling up your RSS feeds. Given the limited amount of time you can devote to a particular task, we'll return to the era of A/B testing Headlines.
axus 9mo ago
I agree with owning the network devices, and lack of control here is a problem that still has solutions. And self-hosting personal services makes sense and we're able to do that. BUT, we don't own the connections. There's always going to be shared infrastructure for connecting these devices worldwide, and without an ideal state of Communism or utopian capitalism we're not going to own them or want to be responsible for them. Any kind of service that depends on a central database is not going to be communally owned. Ownership is an economic problem, the technical aspect is merely interesting. Bitcoin might be a great example of this.
asim 9mo ago
We got here iteratively..not all at once. So the path back...it's iterative. I shouldn't even say back. We're not going back. We have to go in a new direction. And again it's evolutionary. So ultimately a lot of these big systems and big tech companies aren't going anywhere and they will be integral to all infrastructure for the foreseeable future whether that be technical, financial or related to public services. But as individuals we can slowly shift some of our efforts elsewhere in ways that it might matter. Here's my small contribution to that. https://github.com/micro/mu https://github.com/micro/mu - an app platform without ads, algorithms or tracking.
malomalsky 9mo ago
Bro just found fediverse
swiftcoder 9mo ago
The irony of this being fully hosted on GitHub should not be lost. A toaster is sufficient to host a mostly static site, a VPS would be far more than sufficient.
- post-it 9mo ago
  GitHub is free, a VPS isn't.
  - swiftcoder 9mo ago
    You know what they say about the kind of services FAANG gives away for free... And yes, I get the practicality of it. However, when people are actually doing shit like this[1] in the real world, writers of manifestos might consider practicing what they preach a tad more. [1]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com
  - ux266478 9mo ago
    Owning things isn't free (and a VPS isn't owning things, either) I absolutely agree with the concept, but people have to be ready to do their own work rather than delegating it to other parties. Consolidation has happened because these massive conglomerates absorb operational complexity on the cheap, and that's attractive. Moving away from them means we take on the responsibility of doing it ourselves.
- phendrenad2 9mo ago
  You think you "own" a VPS?
  - swiftcoder 9mo ago
    Well, you pay for it at least, and hence enter into a contract with the service provider. A free GitHub account is a come-on by Microsoft to enmesh you further in the world of hosted services - the precise thing this manifesto is complaining about
    - 9mo ago
Findecanor 9mo ago
I remember a web when practically every ISP allowed you to have a "home page" hosted with them. Your home page was situated in the "public_html" directory of your home directory on their server — hence the name. Then the URL was http://www.<hostname.domain>/~<username> I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time. Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?
- graypegg 9mo ago
  I've seen a few around on HN actually! Though they tend to be university systems, or pages hosted on https://tilde.club/ https://tilde.club/
- rokkamokka 9mo ago
  Likely demand dropped and when the infra hosting it was needing replacement it just never got replaced
- sumtechguy 9mo ago
  Think it had more to do with the consolidation of the ISP space. I used to have my choice of dozens of ISP's. Now if I am lucky I might have 2 or 3 from very large companies that did the math on keeping that going. It mostly happened when ADSL and cable took over. In most areas that meant only 2 or 3 companies could actually provide anything at speeds their customers wanted. Think at the time they always said it was cost cutting.
- titzer 9mo ago
  Universities still have this--well, ok, at least for Faculty :) https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~btitzer/riff.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~btitzer/riff.html I actually haven't had a homepage for a long time because of the lack of the easy "put my home directory on the web", but I'd like to go back now to doing that.
- chasd00 9mo ago
  i think Apache sets this up by default or use to. Every user on Linux would get a www, or maybe it was htdocs, folder in their home directory when they were added to the system. Any file you put there is served by Apache at resource /~<username> which was reading from /home/<username>/www on the file system. There use to be lots and lots of ISPs and so they were small enough to have a single webserver with all their customers setup as users and Apache serving content. They'd also setup FTP on the same server so you could get your html files into your www folder. Software like Dreamweaver had a ftp client built in, so you'd click like a "publish" button and it wold login to FTP and transfer your files. i would imagine this went away because it got expensive as the customer base grew and ISPs consolidated and it made no money. Other options with php, mysql, and other services cropped up and could offer more and charge for it so I think ISPs just preferred to concentrate on network access and not hosting websites.
evanevan 9mo ago
I really like this model for individual services. The challenge I've always felt, is shared services -- if I'm running infra myself, I can depend upon it, but if someone else is running it, I'm never really sure if I can, which makes external services really hard to rely on and invest into. Maybe you can get further than expected with individual services? But shared services at some point seem really useful. I think web2 solved that in an unfortunate way, where you know the corporations operating the services / networks are aligned in some ways but not in others. But would be great to have shared services that do have better guarantees. Disclaimer, we're working on something in that direction, but really curious what others have seen or thinking in this area.
mold_aid 9mo ago
Very much enjoyed this. Always am shocked that my colleagues on the humanistic/writing studies side don't have a larger contingent actively contributing to web and publication technologies/specs, ceding so much of that space to folks with design backgrounds; they still don't really invest enough time into understanding networked writing
Tepix 9mo ago
> Tiny computers are like tiny homes They totally suck like tiny homes? No, actually they are better than tiny homes. Browser are the #1 reason why you want a computer that's better than a Pi 500. Wanting to play modern games is #2.
AuthAuth 9mo ago
I really do agree with the sentiment of this guy. I am this guy mentally but what he is saying is so painfully out of touch and completely ignores how people actually use the web today. My bro the web isnt controlled by corps because its to hard to host a web page. Corps have created these extremely far reaching and complex applications and people prefer to use those than browser through statically generated pages. Average man doesnt want to come home and update his page he just wants to open the app on his phone, scroll for a bit and close it. The problem is in the environment but also the user behavior. Unless you can provide a convincing argument to change both by presenting an actual improvement then its farting in the wind
jmadeano 9mo ago
I enjoyed the article, but I’m skeptical of the “democratize via hardware + networking” path. Most people won’t run a Pi, manage updates/backups, or debug home networking, and that’s fine (as you note). But I do think we’re reaching a turning point on the software side. The barrier to building custom, personalized apps is trending toward 0. I’m not naive enough to think every grandma will suddenly start asking ChatGPT to “build me an app to do XYZ,” but with the right UX it can be implicit. Imagine you tell an assistant: “My doctor says my blood sugar is high. Research tips to reduce it.” -> it not only replies with tips, it also proactively builds a custom app (that you own and control) for tracking your blood sugar (measurements, meals, reminders, charts, etc.). You can edit it by describing changes (“add a weekly trend graph,” “don’t nag me after 8pm,” etc.). This doesn’t fully solve your Big Co control issue (they own the flagship models today), but open-weight + local options keep improving. I'm hopeful we have a chance to tip the scales back toward co-owner and participant.
- cess11 9mo ago
  "it also proactively builds a custom app" Does it deploy it as well?
- deepdarkforest 9mo ago
  > You can edit it by describing changes Even this is hard. Most people don't know what they want, and/or they don't know how to describe it/imagine it. They don't even know what a trend graph is. They just want someone else to do the mental effort of creating a nice product. Hence iOS > android for most people. They don't want to customise basically anything other than colours. That's why i predict Lovable/replit etc will not go mainstream. And why chatgpt will just offer you their UIs mainly. Artifacts weren't a big hit
  - RajT88 9mo ago
    If you've never worked in a call center, or in a technical support role, it can be hard to understand just how inarticulate people are on average. Even programmers. ...And how much brainpower goes into understanding what people like this are getting at when they speak about things. There's a lot of context and human element to this; I'm skeptical AI will be any good at it in the near future.
beders 9mo ago
As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point. The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations) For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you to run services over their lines. When DSL was around (I guess it still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect. ISP control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet. The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it. So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is free of back-doors and remote control. There's no guarantee for that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised. We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors. As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis here other than picking the best tool for the job. In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.
- shevy-java 9mo ago
  > In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place. We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible. People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.
  - okanat 9mo ago
    > We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible. Where does such informed political and economic interest and power exist? With whom do we construct such society? Do they have the power and will to fight for it? Normies live with normie standards and with incresing social media exposure with more and more emotional animal-like manipulated world views. They are either ignorant or ambivalent. Will tech people gather on a piece of land and declare independence? Most of my tech worker colleagues are also quite pro-social media and they heavily use it to boost their apparent social status. We cannot even trust our kind. Similar examples of new technology being used to motivate and mobilize masses have always ended with devastating wars and genocides. Previously the speed of propagation of information gave advantages to statespeople like FDR to put an end to increasing racism/Nazism/violent tendencies (of course not everywhere, when let to its own devices new technology almost perfect for constructing dictatorships). Now everybody has equal access to misinformation.
shevy-java 9mo ago
I welcome everyone who wants to imagine a better web. One with less control by greedy mega-corporations and data-sniffing state actors. I am not sure how such a web should look, but I am pretty certain we will need it sooner or later. Otherwise we may end up with "hey, we were in the 1990s generation, we knew a free web - now this has been replaced by walled corporate gardens controlled by a few superrich".
mrcwinn 9mo ago
This is silly nonsense. >I publish this site via GitHub Pages Okay, and that depends on an entire economy and infrastructure of privately owned switching, other network equipment, fiber optic, etc, etc, etc, -- not to mention that if GitHub did not have, as a private company, a profit motive, they wouldn't even bother to offer the service you're using. Sure, yes, rebuild the world but if you want it to be free like open source, you'll also need to make it free like beer -- and that means you'll need to work for free, too. I support the aim. I acknowledge the problems. I'm just so frustrated by these silly oversimplifications of how to solve it.
- nanobuilds 9mo ago
  The spirit and goal is respectable. How we get there, convincing people to join a new web and making it easy and attractive to replace 30 year old infra is something else.
pyrolistical 9mo ago
This is all fine and dandy for websites but what we’ve really been locked out of is email. You can’t run your own email server. All other large email providers will consider your self hosted emails as spam by default. It understandable why they took this stance (due to actual spam) but it is also awfully convenient it also increases their market power. We are now at the whim of large corps even if we get a custom domain with them.
singpolyma3 9mo ago
one note. Even when we all wrote html most people still used a bigco to host it. Maybe if you go back far enough you can say you don't think regional ISPs are "big" but those companies are all gone now
- krapp 9mo ago
  > Even when we all wrote html most people still used a bigco to host it. If you consider Geocities, Tripod or Angelfire (or your local ISP) "bigcos" I guess. It is true that most people didn't host from their own servers and at one point all of those free hosts forced ad banners on your pages but it still doesn't seem like the same thing.
ineptech 9mo ago
I am on board with basically everything this article is arguing, but I think it covers the easy part (that "people run their own servers" is the only solution to the problems caused by relying on giant ad corps to provide the server half of client/server software) and skips the hard part, which is the software they run. Like, suppose some really good personal server software existed. Suppose there were an OS-plus-app-repository platform, akin to linux plus snapcraft, but aimed solely at people who want to host a blog or email server despite knowing nothing and being willing to learn nothing. It installs on to a raspberry pi as easy as Windows. It figures out how to NAT out of your cable modem for you. It does all the disk partitioning and apt-gets and chmods, you just open the companion app on your phone and hit the Wordpress button and presto, you've got a blog. You hit the Minecraft button and you've got your own minecraft server, without having to learn what "-Xms2G -Xmx6G" means. It updates itself automatically, runs server components in sandboxes so they can't compromise each other, and it's crack-proof enough that you can store your bitcoins on it. Etc, etc. If that existed, we wouldn't have to write essays about freedom and so forth to get people to buy it, they'd buy it just because it's there. I mean, look at those digital picture frames - they cost more than a rasbpi and are way less useful, and half the people I know got or gave them for christmas. Why? Because they're neat and they cost less than a hundred bucks and they require no knowledge or effort. If a server that can host your blog were that easy, it'd get adopted too, and we'd be on a path to some kind of distributed social media FB replacement. Imagine the software you could write, if you were allowed to assume that every user had a server to host it on! The problem is, that software doesn't exist and it's not clear how it would ever get made. It'd be a huge effort (possibly "Google building Android" sized) and the extant open source efforts along these lines lack traction, mostly due to the chicken-and-egg problem of any new platform that needs apps to be useful. And until it exists, any kind of neighborhood-internet-collective-power-to-the-people dream has to necessarily begin with hoping that millions of people will spontaneously decide to spend their precious free time doing systems administration. Not to shit on a fine essay that I mostly agree with. It just seems like, without figuring out the software, this is daydreaming.
sepositus 9mo ago
I am in the process of co-founding a new protocol which creates a decentralized root of trust using normal plain-text names (i.e. `foo.bar`). One of the goals I hope to obtain is allowing domain-style lookups of private websites hosted on P2P networks. It's lofty, but the dialog used by OP is _very_ close to why I think it's necessary.
- Cieric 9mo ago
  I've been interested in doing something similar in the past, but I could really never solve issues like domain squatting and stopping individuals from claiming every name possible. Do you have a place where you keep these plans or have discussions around it? Or even just a place where I could get updates if anything does come of it?
  - sepositus 9mo ago
    > I've been interested in doing something similar in the past, but I could really never solve issues like domain squatting and stopping individuals from claiming every name possible I think that's just a property of a naming system. Without something like a centralized threat of force that can know every person participating in the system - there really is no recourse. The approach we are taking is making it difficult to create a speculative market around names which seems to be the driving force behind squatters. Happy to discuss it in more detail: hackernews@sepositus.com (Note: that's an alias that goes to my email address which I avoid putting in public places for obvious reasons).
- anon291 9mo ago
  Have you considered improving ygddrasil or something similar.
  - sepositus 9mo ago
    Yes, the protocol is going to be open and the plan is to submit PRs to various projects when we're at that point. It's not really an "either or" with ygddrasil but more like a "both and."
hirako2000 9mo ago
A web we own better mobile responsive.
procflora 9mo ago
The cynic in me wants to say that most of the web these days is pushing H.264 frames from a CDN to proprietary phone apps and the rest is pushing Widevine video from the same CDN to proprietary browsers and we'll never cooperatively own any of that, even if we wanted to. The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet, collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty pessimistic, but then it is Monday.
hermes_agent 9mo ago
[dead]
cpill 9mo ago
I wonder how hard a distributed search algorithm would be to build into a web server? I guess it would be open to bad actors, but there would also be a way to stop that, distributed moderation? I made a content management system (CMS) for some friends years ago which was very easy to use. It's main paradigm was: 1 folder = 1 page. This was very easy for anyone to manage. Files in the folder were rendered in sort order so you could have an image followed by some markdown etc Was so easy to use I never got anyone (mostly non-technical artists) asking how to change something on their site. Most ppl understand how to organise their content as files and folders. It is the easiest UI I've ever seen for a CMS i.e. no UI :P Was going to expand it to read files from a Dropbox folder so they didn't even need FTP but life... It was in PHP, which at the time, all ISPs supported. Setup was: copy code, change files/folders in `/content` dir and your away.
majicDave 9mo ago
We share many of the same ideas, I am working on a solution, a new type of internet with a new type of browser, and it is going quite well. Something like this can really make a difference I think, it’s definitely possible. https://github.com/mjdave/katipo https://github.com/mjdave/katipo
ericyd 9mo ago
Mobile users hate when site publishers forget this one simple ~trick~ meta tag.
dpc_01234 9mo ago
It's easier than ever to build p2p software. E.g. You can use Pkarr as a distributed identity system, and Iroh for reliable p2p connectivity. There's no point in messing with custom hardware, etc. We could host bunch of redundant p2p access points for everyone, and use p2p portable software for everything. E.g. I'm building a P2P/F2F Social Media protocol that is very close to syndication platform. https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.dpc.pw/rad:zzK566qFsZnXomX2juRjxj9K1LuF https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.dpc.pw/rad:zzK566qFsZn... . I'm not saying that it's exactly the same thing as author is looking for, but the technical bits and even functionality are very close.
etothepii 9mo ago
Can someone explain to me what the difference is between a union in which everyone is a member and a government.
zkmon 9mo ago
Publishing markup content is not the problem world needs solving. Infact there is no problem with web that applies to all users of the web. Most are just consumers of the content. Mostly non-text content. I guess the author first need to get some stats on content type, use cases, money flows, controls etc and then define the problem that applies to most users of the web. Keep in mind that, usually a system that evolves through feedback loops, and shaped by forces, doesn't have a major problem as it's evolution has ensured the fit between itself and it's context. You may call the forces which shape that evolution as evil. But the forces are part of the context that you need to live with. The forces are also a product of that evolution.
- ang_cire 9mo ago
  My impression is that the author is not actually speaking to the internet at large, they're just talking to people who are 1) at least a little tech-savvy, and 2) willing to spend time to decouple from big tech. This is just the author building a personal data/ blog tool for their own use, to feel 'safe'. That's why they liken it to their home. This is not a real roadmap (or even completed thought) for people shifting to micro-enclave internet/ networks. That is already happening in many places, and has been for years, often driven by lack of internet infra rollout in low-income areas. It used to be community-installed wiring, but the advent of mesh networking has allowed this to blow up.
curtisblaine 9mo ago
Yes, but: 1) Cooperatives inevitably transition into centers of power. If a cooperative becomes powerful enough, it becomes another mini-government that "unpublishes" you if you say something they don't like. 2) Your freedom ends at the ISP boundary; you don't own the cables. If the ISP doesn't like what you publish, they just disrupt, throttle or disconnect your upload link. They probably have the legal right already. 3) Even if you own the wires (or you invent a LoRa mesh stable enough to provide an alternative Internet), the government will disrupt you (or worse) if you say something they don't like. It's very likely the will disrupt you preventively because you could potentially say something they don't like. This is not right wing vs left wing: look at the UK, for example (left-wing government, abysmal freedom of speech on the Internet) The issue with publishing content has always been censorship. Anyone in power has incentives to apply as much censorship as they can. It's never been a technical problem.
Razengan 9mo ago
> What if I do not wish to be tenant and product? What can I do to change the equation? Host your own website (on a free server for as long as you can), print out some flyers, paste them around town or pass them around (to bypass the Ad Gods), ask for donations to pay the growing costs of bandwidth etc. as you get more users? Ultimately it comes to down to convincing people, the ickiest task on earth :<
DeathArrow 9mo ago
Using Raspberry Pi, $20 network switches and cheap wire won't be useful for building a new Internet. Also, you don't even have the rights to lay 'em wires wherever you see fit.
Garlef 9mo ago
I what the article proposes is the wrong direction: Instead of every single person to maintain an offering a vertical slice through the whole stack, we should make it easier to publish content in the first place. The real issue that this pushes the burden of maintenance and infrastructure on the individual; But this should be a shared responsibility. Instead we need: - A federated content/file system - An open standard for viewer/app definitions (hosted on this system)
- dumindunuwan 9mo ago
  Ex. Content can be in Git repo. Site can be build via static site generators + automated via CI update site when add new content to Git repo. We only need good blog theme, photo albums theme and profile theme to replace FB, Linkedin even TikTok. Publishers have full control on their own data.
sylware 9mo ago
What's the article is missing: this is directly related to the complexity of file formats and protocols. There are 2 webs: - the web site, to serve noscript/basic (x)html, namely basic HTML forms which can be augmented with <video> and <audio> nowadays, namely it serves web _pages_. It was made super modular, you have browsers not handling CSS, and it is fine for _pages_ with a semantic 2D table (implicit navigation even for braille browsers). Web engines there, are more than reasonable to write an alternative of, even a plain CSS renderer (look at netsurf browser), only text (lynx/edbrowse/etc), graphic (links2/elinks/etc). In the end, 'HTML' is not perfect (like CSS), a bit of a mess actually, that's why they tried an XML representation, a failure because it was literaly sabotaged by... "Big Co" or in the web realm, the 'whatng cartel': I remember their web engines were a pain to use xhtml to develop even a simple page... but not with html... curiously. That said, mistakes were made also on the "w3c" side: the 'semantic web', a real abomination of delirious complexity, which I think is what actually made people jump on the "whatng" train, what a disaster. Now, HTML has been back with its weird(shabby?) parsing, but this was kind of 'cleaned up' and much more rigorously defined. - the web app: the abomination. Basically, only gigantic and insanely complex software can make a web app work (including their SDK), aka only the web engines from Big Co, here 'the whatng cartel'. It is getting worse, it is said web apps are more and more requiring only one web engine to 'properly work' (often gogol blink), and suspicions are very strong at this is made _on purpose_ (I remember the day when gmail.com did disable their noscript/basic (x)html web interface... then POP3 not a long time ago... I guess you all see where this is going). In this realm, there is near ZERO possibility to create a _real-life_ alternative without a bunch a developers laser focused on that for one billion years. I have been wishing for an alternative web engine I could build from source with a simple SDK, does not exist, and even the few attempts here and there are _not_ doing that: they lean towards super complex syntax computer languages (c++ and similar), hence a failure right from the start. The 'web3'? A lean javascript engine (for instance quickjs, but there are others), with a small set of OS basic abstraction APIs, and a few 'accelerated' specialized APIs (vector drawing, pixel drawing blitter, video decoding, glyph drawing, etc). First problem: nobody will agree an those interfaces (they would have to be as simple as possible), and the 'whatng cartel' will make sure their are useless... Or a even simpler "HTML" (probably the same with CSS)? "markdown" like the article suggest? Would it have enough expressive power? Again, nobody will agree on the format and will want to make its own. A good middle ground is to work with a 'subset' of HTML: rought on the edge, but would do a good enough job for nearly all online services out-there, whatever the platform. Nearly 100% of the online services were running on that a few years back, and with <video> and <audio>, it could be even closer than 100% nowadays. And there is the danger of the 'mobile app only': there, the only way out is to regulate and enforce the availability of a small, stable in time, set of as simple as possible protocols and file formats to allow reasonable efforts at developping an 'app' for an alternative platform (elf/linux, *BSD, fooOS, etc).
wkrsz 9mo ago
My concern is that when we succeed making "our own web" popular, the Big Cos will lobby for legislation that would put burden on all operators, such that it would be unreasonably costly for small operators but easy for themselves to meet. Probably under disguise of "think of the children". Besides technology we'd need a strong organization advocating for "our own web".
- ang_cire 9mo ago
  That is already happening, but this is where peer-to-peer becomes helpful, because in order for 'Big Cos' and 'Big Gub' to audit your web they have to have visibility into it in the first place.
  - wkrsz 9mo ago
    I'm thinking more of situation where definitions of mass-media are extended to cover individual bloggers. > Professional influencers with over 500,000 followers fall under the Dutch Media Act (Mediawet, 2008) and are supervised by the media authority CvDM, which applies rules similar to those for on-demand audiovisual media services, including requirements on recognizable advertising and protection of minors. https://cmpf.eui.eu/influencers-as-news-creators-implications-for-media-regulation/#:~:text=Professional%20influencers%20with%20over%20500%2C000,advertising%20and%20protection%20of%20minors. https://cmpf.eui.eu/influencers-as-news-creators-implication... > Current Rule: Now, influencers with 100,000+ followers (across YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok) who post at least 24 videos a year and earn money must register with the CvdM and pay annual supervision fees. > The Burden: You are expected to know your reach. If you cross the 100,000 mark and fail to register, you are technically in violation. Another example: https://medium.com/michigan-news/proposed-florida-blogging-law-aligns-with-russia-china-and-iran-to-track-sites-a7746a21dfdf https://medium.com/michigan-news/proposed-florida-blogging-l...
squeefers 9mo ago
> think when a significant number of individuals and cooperatives own the hardware and uses simpler software we can impact the Web and Internet in a positive way. That's my hypothesis. this man lives away with the fairies. i need read not a single word more
tlocke 9mo ago
Could IPFS be the solution here? https://ipfs.tech/ https://ipfs.tech/
talkingtab 9mo ago
The top comment (right now) is saying this cannot be done. That is wrong. It is exactly the same as those people who said "We cannot build an internet because of [insert infinity of issues]". The one we are using for this discussion. We live in a time where people somehow think they cannot make bread without a $400 (USD) bread making machine. We suffer from learned helplessness, paint-by-number syndrome, follow-the-leader syndrome, and cargo-cult thinking. We use recipes instead of developing skills. Implementing "a web we own" is a hard and difficult problem. The poster is correct that ISP's are a problem. But if this learned helplessness is the top comment on "HACKER" News then there is something seriously wrong with how HN works. This is NOT about the commenters. This is about a system of interaction - comments on HN - that seems to promote anything but hacking. My apologies for the "rant" nature of this post, but there is a point here that I believe is worth stating. Or you know, just unfollow me, vote me down, and I probably misspelld some words along the way.
- Muhammad523 9mo ago
  I agree. (Almost) Every problem that looks impossible to solve actually is not. People should not focus on "Why we cant do this because of current problems." but rather on "How could we possibly do this, considering the current problems?"
econ 9mo ago
Start by making a website that works on mobile. You can't just talk to part of the audience.
- econ 9mo ago
  You can't sell a product or an idea and put random nonsensical limitations on who may buy or listen to it.
thesuitonym 9mo ago
Right of the bat, first sentence already bugs me. I hate this "woe is meeee the web is centralized" nonsense. No, the WWW is not owned by big companies, you have decided to only go to web sites owned by big companies. You might be able to make the argument that the Internet is owned by a few big companies, depending on what you consider the Internet to be (Is it the physical hardware, or the content that passes through the hardware?), but the web? The World Wide Web? What are you even talking about? Of course, I am asking bad faith questions here. I know the author is fully aware that the WWW is free and available to all. I don't assume any maliciousness here, but the author is not being honest about their intent. They know you can just put a website out there, but that's not the problem. The problem is that they won't get 2.5 million views, 100,000 interactions, and 1000 comments. They want a more open web, like it was back in the day. But then you remind them that back then having 1000 views on your entire site (let alone any single page) was considered successful, and that's not what they meant. The problem is that everyone wants to eat their cake and have it, too. You either get a small web, where page views are counted in the hundreds, or you get locked into the big players and get the views you want. I, for one, choose the former.
zeckalpha 9mo ago
This sounds a lot like the philosophy behind Gemini protocol. I would recommend the author take a look at that.
sh2p 9mo ago
Sponsored by Raspberry Pi...
dugmartin 9mo ago
Eons ago I developed a site+Windows app called 24Link (I know, horrible name) that let you run a tiny ~50KB web server in your taskbar and point it as a folder on your machine. If you visited 24link.com/{username} you would get a full page iframe that pointed at your IP:port hosting the 24Link webserver and/or a not available message if the app heartbeat failed. It quickly got to around 50K users and I thought with the then inevitable switchover to ipv6 everyone could run it. Alas both 24Link and ipv6 failed to break out but I think something in that vein could still work.
RajT88 9mo ago
I just came across this: https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/
malklera 9mo ago
This is not a technical problem, is about money and people. Majority(>50%) of people have no idea what an OS is, you cannot expect then to care about self-hosting. People(me included) do what is easier/cheaper, maybe down the line there are principles or ideology in the decision making. I do not bother to read the complete article, by your actions you are a tenant/product, better lead by example.
abhishekjiitr 9mo ago
asked claude to generate a beautiful epub based on the html page. The results are exquisite!
zerotolerance 9mo ago
We do not have a supply side issue. We have a worsening discovery and discoverability issue. People publish on platforms because that is where they might be FOUND / or pushed by the algorithm into the feeds of others. RSS is subscription, not discovery. Search / suggest / IR requires scaled centralization. Then there are the network effects and activation cost to moving. Yeah, sure we need this. The time for it was back in like 2005 at the latest. The real issue is more existential. Right now we're about to lose the war that requires digital connectivity to live and use modern services. We're going to lose cash payments. If you're going to fight a fight, that is where the effort matters in 2026.

312 points by speckx 9mo ago

I think the main issue with federated apps is the identity and moderation. Without identity verification is hard to moderate so you end up with closed systems where some big CO does the moderation at an acceptable level

sowbug 9mo ago
This is only half a thought. The current wave of AI agents is diminishing the value of identity as a DDOS or content-moderation signal. The formula until now included bot = bad, but unless your service wants to exclude everyone using OpenClaw and friends, that's no longer a valid heuristic. If identity is no longer a strong signal, then the internet must move away from CAPTCHAs and logins and reputation, and focus more on the proposed content or action instead. Which might not be so bad. After all, if I read a thought-provoking, original, enriching comment on HN, do I really care if it was actually written by a dog? We might finally be getting close to https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/. One more half thought: what if the solution to the Sybil problem is deciding that it's not a problem? Go ahead and spin up your bot network, join the party. If we can design systems that assign zero value to uniqueness and require originality or creativity for a contribution to matter, then successful Sybil "attacks" are no longer attacks, but free work donated by the attacker.
- caconym_ 9mo ago
  > if I read a thought-provoking, original, enriching comment on HN, do I really care if it was actually written by a dog? I would rather just read the thought as it was originally expressed by a human somewhere in the AI's training data, rather than a version of it that's been laundered through AI and deployed according to the separate, hidden intent of the AI's operator.

ted537 9mo ago

Unfortunately the transparency of the IP stack means that unless u want whole world to know where u live via one DNS query, you'd need to use a service to proxy back to urself. And if ur paying for remote compute anyways, you could probably just host ur stuff there. Any machine that can proxy traffic back to you is just as capable of hosting ur static stuff there.

nickorlow 9mo ago
It only gives a pretty rough estimation, not a street address. I don't think many self-hosters have run into issue w/ this.

hellcow 9mo ago

> I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing online...

graypegg 9mo ago
I think the point the author is trying to make is more so about these mini networks on their own LAN, which their family uses. (And maybe dreaming of a neighbourhood utility LAN as a middle ground between LAN in your house and WAN as just a trunk to a big ISP node) The full quote is - A Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a 3 gigabyte hard drive setup as a "server" (makes this site available on my home network[9]) - I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access (I have the least expensive subscription for this) ... [9] I can view my personal web on my home network from my phone, tablet and computers. So can the rest of my family.
- redkoala 9mo ago
  The equivalent self contained home server exists today in the homelab community, either with Mac Minis or NAS systems running Unraid or TrueNAS with community apps. Add in Tailscale on top for remote access. What’s needed is a lot of work on the software front to make it much easier, with interoperable standards. Self-hosted WYSYWIG options as easy to use as the social media tools for photos and writing and social posts. Ability to run distributed chatroom style instances with tracker like discoverability to replace Discord. Built in backup options with easy offsite backup replication.
- squeefers 9mo ago
  hes like these off-gridders that use iphones.... larping some kind of self-sufficieny, whilst being firmly tied to industrialised society and completely unwilling to sever the link
  - RattlesnakeJake 9mo ago
    At least they can comfort themselves with the fact that their iPhones support Lockdown Mode XD

born-jre 9mo ago

I kind of resonate with a lot of things in the article. My own personal view is that we should make hosting stuff vastly simpler; that's one of the goals of my project, at least my attempt (self promo) https://github.com/blue-monads/potatoverse https://github.com/blue-monads/potatoverse

nine_k 9mo ago
Potatoverse is a great name :)) BTW do you remember Sandstorm.io?
- born-jre 9mo ago
  Thanks cap'n-py. Yeah, I love Sandstorm. My goal is to be more portable, lighter, and a 'download binary and run' kind of tool. There are also other attempts around what I call the 'packaging with Docker' approach (Coolify, etc.), which are more attempts at packaging existing apps. But my approach—the platform—gives a bunch of stuff you can use to make apps faster, but you have to bend to its idiosyncrasies. In turn, you do not need a beefy home lab to run it (not everyone is a tinkerer). It's more focused, so it will be easier for the end user running it than for the developer.
inigyou 9mo ago
[dead]

podgorniy 9mo ago

Co-ownership of the hardware is a social not technical problem. Think of questions of trust, responsibility, who has power, who and how contributes, how decisions are made, etc, etc

selridge 9mo ago

Who is this we, kemosabe?

zer00eyz 9mo ago

> Simple to use software that empowers us to both read and write hypertext4 and syndicated content Simple to use software... this would be grand! > Raspberry Pi OS (a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU Linux) Is this simple? I would contend that it is not. Why do I tell people "buy apple products" as a matter of course? Because they have decent security, great ease of use, and support is an Apple Store away. They still manage to screw things up. Look at the emergence of docker as an install method for software on linux. We sing the praises of this as means of software distribution and installation... and yet it's functionally un-usable by normal (read: non technical) people. Usability needs to make a comeback.

otabdeveloper4 9mo ago
> great ease of use Apple stuff is a nightmare of dark patterns and user-hostile idiocy. Maybe it's easy if you have Stockholm syndrome and have internalized all the arcane gestures, icons and bug avoidance patterns. The average normie has no clue, though. (This is borne from experience, I have like 8 iPhones in the immediate family among children and seniors.)

canadiantim 9mo ago

I personally think the trend we witnessed with clawdbot where people ran to buy mac minis or other ways of self hosting ai agents is going to be a huge wind in the sails for generally hosting things at home.

liveoneggs 9mo ago

This guy has been around long enough to know about NNTP, which is the original distributed people-focused web, but talks about how HTML is some kind of barrier to entry. HTTP requires always-on + always-discoverable infrastructure It's all over the place.

disease 9mo ago

As the author of a content management system I made with the idea to democratize internet content creation, I've had a lot of the same thoughts that the author brings up here. I've always thought that even learning Markdown was a bridge to far when it comes to empowering non-technical users however. In my experience it's best just to supply tooling similar to Word where you have buttons for things like lists and bolding. Using Markdown as the format itself is something I will agree with though. Another thought I had is that local AI could most definitely play a part in helping non-technical users create the kind of content they want. If your CMS gives you a GPT-like chat window that allows a non-technical user to restyle the page as they like, or do things like make mass edits - then I think that is something that could help some of the issues mentioned here.

tvink 9mo ago
It's definitely an approach. I do think in true democratization of the internet, teaching people some tech is inevitable. We just can't have equal access if we retain the classes of user and maker as completely distinct.
chasd00 9mo ago
> supply tooling similar to Word just fyi, Word still has Save As -> Web Page (.htm). For a blog post or newsletter type thing i bet it works just fine.
- graypegg 9mo ago
  I wonder if some part of the FrontPage [0] codebase lives on in there... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage
  - jodrellblank 9mo ago
    https://openlivewriter.com/ https://openlivewriter.com/ lives on
mb2100 9mo ago

sagaro 9mo ago

I agree with the point that big companies have persuaded people that only they can offer ease of publishing content. most of my friends publish on Facebook, X, Instagram etc. I have tried to get them to publish markdown sites using GitHub pages, but the pain of having to git commit and do it via desktop was the blocker. So I recently made them a mobile app called JekyllPress [0] with which they can publish their posts similar to WordPress mobile app. And now a bunch of them regularly publish on GitHub pages. I think with more tools to simplify the publishing process, more people will start using GitHub pages (my app still requires some painful onboarding like creating a repo, enabling GitHub pages and getting PAT, no oAuth as I don't have any server). [0] https://www.gapp.in/projects/jekyllpress/ https://www.gapp.in/projects/jekyllpress/

righthand 9mo ago
Isn’t publishing on Github Pages still posting to a corporate centrally owned entity and not a solution to the problem described?
- sagaro 9mo ago
  But it is portable. It is essentially markdown files. You can download your repo, compile the Jekyll to static pages and publish them anywhere. When you publish to Facebook, WordPress etc you can't easily get your stuff out. You will have to process them even if they allow you to download your content as a zip folder. The images will be broken. Links between pages won't work etc.
  - righthand 9mo ago
    Facebook provides a data export service which gives you a zip file with a web version of all your content. I’m not sure what the difference is then between that and a Github hosted repository of all your content as a webpage.
    - sagaro 9mo ago
      The main difference is the data structure and the intent of the export. Facebook's tool is built for data compliance and local offline viewing, not web portability. If you open that Facebook zip file, the HTML version is just a massive dump of proprietary markup. To actually migrate those posts to a new blog, you'd have to write a custom scraper just to extract your own text from their messy div tags. If you use their JSON export, you still have to write a custom script to parse their specific schema and remap all the hardcoded local image paths so they work on a live server. With a Github Pages repo, your content is already sitting there as raw, standardized Markdown. You can just take that folder of .md files, drop it into Hugo, 11ty, or any other static site generator, and it just works. No scraping or data-wrangling required.

IFC_LLC 9mo ago

I mean, you do have a point, and I'll quite agree with it. The only way of monetizing your writing is to use Substack or Medium, or whatever. Yet your approach is appallingly low on the other side of the spectrum. I've been in IT for the past 25 years. I have yet to see a non-IT person who knows what dedicated IP is. If you are not publishing it on the internet, then what's the point? I've seen plenty of companies where the owner just had a read-only shared drive, where people can rummage thru a pack of PDFs. This' was all fine with that. You have to understand, manage and work with the complexities of the tools, and offer tools quite enough for the task. It's alright to offer what you do to an engineer who has a spare Pi and a couple of days to kill. But it's quite useless for anyone else to adopt.

RajT88 9mo ago

The only way we own a web of our own is to develop much more of a culture of leaving smallish machines online all the time. Imagine something like Tor or BitTorrent, but everyone has a very simple way of running their own node for content hosting. That always-on device? To get critical mass, instead of just the nerds, you'd need it to ship with devices which are always-on, like routers/gateways, smart TV's. Then you're back to being at the mercy of centralized companies who also don't love patching their security vulnerabilities.

jejeyyy77 9mo ago
if only we all had a little device that was always on and and connected….
- amarant 9mo ago
  If I'm reading the implication right, you're having a pretty terrible idea. Glossing over what running a server would do to your battery, it would never work because of the routing issues you'll run into. With IPv6 it would theoretically be possible, but currently with ipv4 and NATs everywhere, your website would almost never be reachable, even with fancy workarounds like dynDNS
  - ericd 9mo ago
    Heh could also be your router?
  - koalacongregate 9mo ago
    Can you explain more about the routing issues? Because I've also been thinking about how practically everyone has an old smartphone with a broken screen in a drawer somewhere, and whether we could encourage people to use that for self-hosting. If you leave it at home, always plugged in and on your own network, I don't know how it would be different than any other device running a server?
  - intrikate 9mo ago
    No good reason to do this, but I would imagine you could set up a site-to-site VPN with Wireguard (or hell, Tailscale) from your phone to a VPS, and have people hit the public server which routes back over your tunnel to your phone for access to the data. I'm almost curious enough to try for myself.

cousin_it 9mo ago

It's not about ease of publishing. The issue is what people get in return for publishing. Until you can design a platform that gives top creators as much money+attention as commercial platforms, you'll see a drain of top creators and their viewers to commercial platforms.

munificent 9mo ago
100%. You don't even need to give people money. It's about attention and feedback. People post photos on Instagram and status updates on Facebook because their friends will see it there and give it a thumbs up. A couple of decades ago, I spent a lot of time laboriously building a website for scratch for my photography. It was objectively a really nice site. I had my own domain, hosted it on a VPS, and put a ton of work into the layout and design. But none of my friends ever thought to go there. I could see by my web stats that every now and then a random stranger would find the site... but they had no easy way of connecting with me and acknowledging that they saw it. If they put a lot of effort in, they could find my email address and email, but that's a hell of a lot harder than just clicking a little thumbs up button next to a Facebook post or filling a comment in the comment box. Uploading photos to my site was about as rewarding as printing them out and throwing them in the trash. I thought about adding support for that to my site, but then it opens the whole can of worms around user-generated content, abuse, moderation, etc. Eventually, I moved to Flickr, which at the time was an actual community that gave me that connection. Then Flickr fizzled out. Now, on the rare times I bother to process a photo... I just upload it to Facebook because that's where (a dwindling subset of) my friends are. It's not about the content. It's about the human connection. A CMS won't fix that.
- tclancy 9mo ago
  >It's about attention and feedback. Feedback maybe, but blogging didn't start for attention. That's something that got bolted on by a nasty virus we as humans tend to be carriers of. I don't think feedback was even an inspiration for the initial bloggers.
  - munificent 9mo ago

themacguffinman 9mo ago

I think this mostly misses the biggest reason why writers would choose big tech platforms or other big platforms: discovery and aggregation. If you want to speak to be heard and not just for its own sake, then you want to go where the people are hanging out and where they could actually find your content. This is like talking about how book authors don't need Amazon when you have a printer and glue at home.

istillwritecode 9mo ago

I like how it's not mobile friendly.

moffers 9mo ago

It’s not really covered, but p2p technology combined with every phone in the world (and a little wishful thinking) could make for some neat applications.

Jaauthor 9mo ago

I don't wanna brag but this is pretty much the premise behind my soon-to-be-published scifi novel: https://inkican.com/mesh-middle-grade-scifi-thriller/ https://inkican.com/mesh-middle-grade-scifi-thriller/

octoclaw 9mo ago

The real barrier was never technical. It was convenience and discovery. Running a Pi at home is trivial for anyone on HN, but the moment you want people to actually find your stuff, you need DNS, a stable IP, and some way to not get buried under the noise. Tailscale and similar overlay networks have made the "accessible from anywhere" part way easier than it used to be. The missing piece is still discovery. RSS was the closest we got to decentralized discovery, and we collectively let it rot. Maybe it's time to bring it back properly.

jeromechoo 9mo ago
What does “bringing (RSS) back properly” entail in your eyes? It’s still alive. Many sites still use it. Many people still subscribe to those sites. RSS reader apps are still being created to this day.
- naasking 9mo ago
  RSS directories perhaps, instead of relying on search engines.
  - jeromechoo 9mo ago
    There are a few. Try this one: https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/
tsumnia 9mo ago
> The missing piece is still discovery. I think the key issue here is that Attention is a temporal construct, meaning discovery is often tied to "being the first thing that comes to people's minds" which means SEO, reverse engineering the ranking algorithms, and constantly having to manage an "online persona". Note none of those things contribute to the actual work you're doing, just your "marketing department" (and whatever time/financial "budget" you intend to give it). MrBeast figured out the YouTube algorithm - post early and often. Is that how we exist on modern Internet when every website/thumbnail is engineered by a team to maximize clickthrough rates? I agree RSS is useful, but it faces the same scalability issues if everyone starts filling up your RSS feeds. Given the limited amount of time you can devote to a particular task, we'll return to the era of A/B testing Headlines.

axus 9mo ago

I agree with owning the network devices, and lack of control here is a problem that still has solutions. And self-hosting personal services makes sense and we're able to do that. BUT, we don't own the connections. There's always going to be shared infrastructure for connecting these devices worldwide, and without an ideal state of Communism or utopian capitalism we're not going to own them or want to be responsible for them. Any kind of service that depends on a central database is not going to be communally owned. Ownership is an economic problem, the technical aspect is merely interesting. Bitcoin might be a great example of this.

asim 9mo ago

We got here iteratively..not all at once. So the path back...it's iterative. I shouldn't even say back. We're not going back. We have to go in a new direction. And again it's evolutionary. So ultimately a lot of these big systems and big tech companies aren't going anywhere and they will be integral to all infrastructure for the foreseeable future whether that be technical, financial or related to public services. But as individuals we can slowly shift some of our efforts elsewhere in ways that it might matter. Here's my small contribution to that. https://github.com/micro/mu https://github.com/micro/mu - an app platform without ads, algorithms or tracking.

malomalsky 9mo ago

Bro just found fediverse

swiftcoder 9mo ago

The irony of this being fully hosted on GitHub should not be lost. A toaster is sufficient to host a mostly static site, a VPS would be far more than sufficient.

post-it 9mo ago
GitHub is free, a VPS isn't.
- swiftcoder 9mo ago
  You know what they say about the kind of services FAANG gives away for free... And yes, I get the practicality of it. However, when people are actually doing shit like this[1] in the real world, writers of manifestos might consider practicing what they preach a tad more. [1]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com
- ux266478 9mo ago
  Owning things isn't free (and a VPS isn't owning things, either) I absolutely agree with the concept, but people have to be ready to do their own work rather than delegating it to other parties. Consolidation has happened because these massive conglomerates absorb operational complexity on the cheap, and that's attractive. Moving away from them means we take on the responsibility of doing it ourselves.
phendrenad2 9mo ago
You think you "own" a VPS?
- swiftcoder 9mo ago
  Well, you pay for it at least, and hence enter into a contract with the service provider. A free GitHub account is a come-on by Microsoft to enmesh you further in the world of hosted services - the precise thing this manifesto is complaining about
  - 9mo ago

Findecanor 9mo ago

I remember a web when practically every ISP allowed you to have a "home page" hosted with them. Your home page was situated in the "public_html" directory of your home directory on their server — hence the name. Then the URL was http://www.<hostname.domain>/~<username> I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time. Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?

graypegg 9mo ago
I've seen a few around on HN actually! Though they tend to be university systems, or pages hosted on https://tilde.club/ https://tilde.club/
rokkamokka 9mo ago
Likely demand dropped and when the infra hosting it was needing replacement it just never got replaced
sumtechguy 9mo ago
Think it had more to do with the consolidation of the ISP space. I used to have my choice of dozens of ISP's. Now if I am lucky I might have 2 or 3 from very large companies that did the math on keeping that going. It mostly happened when ADSL and cable took over. In most areas that meant only 2 or 3 companies could actually provide anything at speeds their customers wanted. Think at the time they always said it was cost cutting.
titzer 9mo ago
Universities still have this--well, ok, at least for Faculty :) https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~btitzer/riff.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~btitzer/riff.html I actually haven't had a homepage for a long time because of the lack of the easy "put my home directory on the web", but I'd like to go back now to doing that.
chasd00 9mo ago
i think Apache sets this up by default or use to. Every user on Linux would get a www, or maybe it was htdocs, folder in their home directory when they were added to the system. Any file you put there is served by Apache at resource /~<username> which was reading from /home/<username>/www on the file system. There use to be lots and lots of ISPs and so they were small enough to have a single webserver with all their customers setup as users and Apache serving content. They'd also setup FTP on the same server so you could get your html files into your www folder. Software like Dreamweaver had a ftp client built in, so you'd click like a "publish" button and it wold login to FTP and transfer your files. i would imagine this went away because it got expensive as the customer base grew and ISPs consolidated and it made no money. Other options with php, mysql, and other services cropped up and could offer more and charge for it so I think ISPs just preferred to concentrate on network access and not hosting websites.

evanevan 9mo ago

I really like this model for individual services. The challenge I've always felt, is shared services -- if I'm running infra myself, I can depend upon it, but if someone else is running it, I'm never really sure if I can, which makes external services really hard to rely on and invest into. Maybe you can get further than expected with individual services? But shared services at some point seem really useful. I think web2 solved that in an unfortunate way, where you know the corporations operating the services / networks are aligned in some ways but not in others. But would be great to have shared services that do have better guarantees. Disclaimer, we're working on something in that direction, but really curious what others have seen or thinking in this area.

mold_aid 9mo ago

Very much enjoyed this. Always am shocked that my colleagues on the humanistic/writing studies side don't have a larger contingent actively contributing to web and publication technologies/specs, ceding so much of that space to folks with design backgrounds; they still don't really invest enough time into understanding networked writing

Tepix 9mo ago

> Tiny computers are like tiny homes They totally suck like tiny homes? No, actually they are better than tiny homes. Browser are the #1 reason why you want a computer that's better than a Pi 500. Wanting to play modern games is #2.

AuthAuth 9mo ago

I really do agree with the sentiment of this guy. I am this guy mentally but what he is saying is so painfully out of touch and completely ignores how people actually use the web today. My bro the web isnt controlled by corps because its to hard to host a web page. Corps have created these extremely far reaching and complex applications and people prefer to use those than browser through statically generated pages. Average man doesnt want to come home and update his page he just wants to open the app on his phone, scroll for a bit and close it. The problem is in the environment but also the user behavior. Unless you can provide a convincing argument to change both by presenting an actual improvement then its farting in the wind

jmadeano 9mo ago

I enjoyed the article, but I’m skeptical of the “democratize via hardware + networking” path. Most people won’t run a Pi, manage updates/backups, or debug home networking, and that’s fine (as you note). But I do think we’re reaching a turning point on the software side. The barrier to building custom, personalized apps is trending toward 0. I’m not naive enough to think every grandma will suddenly start asking ChatGPT to “build me an app to do XYZ,” but with the right UX it can be implicit. Imagine you tell an assistant: “My doctor says my blood sugar is high. Research tips to reduce it.” -> it not only replies with tips, it also proactively builds a custom app (that you own and control) for tracking your blood sugar (measurements, meals, reminders, charts, etc.). You can edit it by describing changes (“add a weekly trend graph,” “don’t nag me after 8pm,” etc.). This doesn’t fully solve your Big Co control issue (they own the flagship models today), but open-weight + local options keep improving. I'm hopeful we have a chance to tip the scales back toward co-owner and participant.

cess11 9mo ago
"it also proactively builds a custom app" Does it deploy it as well?
deepdarkforest 9mo ago
> You can edit it by describing changes Even this is hard. Most people don't know what they want, and/or they don't know how to describe it/imagine it. They don't even know what a trend graph is. They just want someone else to do the mental effort of creating a nice product. Hence iOS > android for most people. They don't want to customise basically anything other than colours. That's why i predict Lovable/replit etc will not go mainstream. And why chatgpt will just offer you their UIs mainly. Artifacts weren't a big hit
- RajT88 9mo ago
  If you've never worked in a call center, or in a technical support role, it can be hard to understand just how inarticulate people are on average. Even programmers. ...And how much brainpower goes into understanding what people like this are getting at when they speak about things. There's a lot of context and human element to this; I'm skeptical AI will be any good at it in the near future.

beders 9mo ago

As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point. The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations) For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you to run services over their lines. When DSL was around (I guess it still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect. ISP control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet. The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it. So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is free of back-doors and remote control. There's no guarantee for that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised. We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors. As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis here other than picking the best tool for the job. In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.

shevy-java 9mo ago
> In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place. We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible. People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.
- okanat 9mo ago
  > We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible. Where does such informed political and economic interest and power exist? With whom do we construct such society? Do they have the power and will to fight for it? Normies live with normie standards and with incresing social media exposure with more and more emotional animal-like manipulated world views. They are either ignorant or ambivalent. Will tech people gather on a piece of land and declare independence? Most of my tech worker colleagues are also quite pro-social media and they heavily use it to boost their apparent social status. We cannot even trust our kind. Similar examples of new technology being used to motivate and mobilize masses have always ended with devastating wars and genocides. Previously the speed of propagation of information gave advantages to statespeople like FDR to put an end to increasing racism/Nazism/violent tendencies (of course not everywhere, when let to its own devices new technology almost perfect for constructing dictatorships). Now everybody has equal access to misinformation.

shevy-java 9mo ago

I welcome everyone who wants to imagine a better web. One with less control by greedy mega-corporations and data-sniffing state actors. I am not sure how such a web should look, but I am pretty certain we will need it sooner or later. Otherwise we may end up with "hey, we were in the 1990s generation, we knew a free web - now this has been replaced by walled corporate gardens controlled by a few superrich".

mrcwinn 9mo ago

This is silly nonsense. >I publish this site via GitHub Pages Okay, and that depends on an entire economy and infrastructure of privately owned switching, other network equipment, fiber optic, etc, etc, etc, -- not to mention that if GitHub did not have, as a private company, a profit motive, they wouldn't even bother to offer the service you're using. Sure, yes, rebuild the world but if you want it to be free like open source, you'll also need to make it free like beer -- and that means you'll need to work for free, too. I support the aim. I acknowledge the problems. I'm just so frustrated by these silly oversimplifications of how to solve it.

nanobuilds 9mo ago
The spirit and goal is respectable. How we get there, convincing people to join a new web and making it easy and attractive to replace 30 year old infra is something else.

pyrolistical 9mo ago

This is all fine and dandy for websites but what we’ve really been locked out of is email. You can’t run your own email server. All other large email providers will consider your self hosted emails as spam by default. It understandable why they took this stance (due to actual spam) but it is also awfully convenient it also increases their market power. We are now at the whim of large corps even if we get a custom domain with them.

singpolyma3 9mo ago

one note. Even when we all wrote html most people still used a bigco to host it. Maybe if you go back far enough you can say you don't think regional ISPs are "big" but those companies are all gone now

krapp 9mo ago
> Even when we all wrote html most people still used a bigco to host it. If you consider Geocities, Tripod or Angelfire (or your local ISP) "bigcos" I guess. It is true that most people didn't host from their own servers and at one point all of those free hosts forced ad banners on your pages but it still doesn't seem like the same thing.

ineptech 9mo ago

I am on board with basically everything this article is arguing, but I think it covers the easy part (that "people run their own servers" is the only solution to the problems caused by relying on giant ad corps to provide the server half of client/server software) and skips the hard part, which is the software they run. Like, suppose some really good personal server software existed. Suppose there were an OS-plus-app-repository platform, akin to linux plus snapcraft, but aimed solely at people who want to host a blog or email server despite knowing nothing and being willing to learn nothing. It installs on to a raspberry pi as easy as Windows. It figures out how to NAT out of your cable modem for you. It does all the disk partitioning and apt-gets and chmods, you just open the companion app on your phone and hit the Wordpress button and presto, you've got a blog. You hit the Minecraft button and you've got your own minecraft server, without having to learn what "-Xms2G -Xmx6G" means. It updates itself automatically, runs server components in sandboxes so they can't compromise each other, and it's crack-proof enough that you can store your bitcoins on it. Etc, etc. If that existed, we wouldn't have to write essays about freedom and so forth to get people to buy it, they'd buy it just because it's there. I mean, look at those digital picture frames - they cost more than a rasbpi and are way less useful, and half the people I know got or gave them for christmas. Why? Because they're neat and they cost less than a hundred bucks and they require no knowledge or effort. If a server that can host your blog were that easy, it'd get adopted too, and we'd be on a path to some kind of distributed social media FB replacement. Imagine the software you could write, if you were allowed to assume that every user had a server to host it on! The problem is, that software doesn't exist and it's not clear how it would ever get made. It'd be a huge effort (possibly "Google building Android" sized) and the extant open source efforts along these lines lack traction, mostly due to the chicken-and-egg problem of any new platform that needs apps to be useful. And until it exists, any kind of neighborhood-internet-collective-power-to-the-people dream has to necessarily begin with hoping that millions of people will spontaneously decide to spend their precious free time doing systems administration. Not to shit on a fine essay that I mostly agree with. It just seems like, without figuring out the software, this is daydreaming.

sepositus 9mo ago

I am in the process of co-founding a new protocol which creates a decentralized root of trust using normal plain-text names (i.e. `foo.bar`). One of the goals I hope to obtain is allowing domain-style lookups of private websites hosted on P2P networks. It's lofty, but the dialog used by OP is _very_ close to why I think it's necessary.

Cieric 9mo ago
I've been interested in doing something similar in the past, but I could really never solve issues like domain squatting and stopping individuals from claiming every name possible. Do you have a place where you keep these plans or have discussions around it? Or even just a place where I could get updates if anything does come of it?
- sepositus 9mo ago
  > I've been interested in doing something similar in the past, but I could really never solve issues like domain squatting and stopping individuals from claiming every name possible I think that's just a property of a naming system. Without something like a centralized threat of force that can know every person participating in the system - there really is no recourse. The approach we are taking is making it difficult to create a speculative market around names which seems to be the driving force behind squatters. Happy to discuss it in more detail: hackernews@sepositus.com (Note: that's an alias that goes to my email address which I avoid putting in public places for obvious reasons).
anon291 9mo ago
Have you considered improving ygddrasil or something similar.
- sepositus 9mo ago
  Yes, the protocol is going to be open and the plan is to submit PRs to various projects when we're at that point. It's not really an "either or" with ygddrasil but more like a "both and."

hirako2000 9mo ago

A web we own better mobile responsive.

procflora 9mo ago

The cynic in me wants to say that most of the web these days is pushing H.264 frames from a CDN to proprietary phone apps and the rest is pushing Widevine video from the same CDN to proprietary browsers and we'll never cooperatively own any of that, even if we wanted to. The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet, collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty pessimistic, but then it is Monday.

hermes_agent 9mo ago

[dead]

cpill 9mo ago

I wonder how hard a distributed search algorithm would be to build into a web server? I guess it would be open to bad actors, but there would also be a way to stop that, distributed moderation? I made a content management system (CMS) for some friends years ago which was very easy to use. It's main paradigm was: 1 folder = 1 page. This was very easy for anyone to manage. Files in the folder were rendered in sort order so you could have an image followed by some markdown etc Was so easy to use I never got anyone (mostly non-technical artists) asking how to change something on their site. Most ppl understand how to organise their content as files and folders. It is the easiest UI I've ever seen for a CMS i.e. no UI :P Was going to expand it to read files from a Dropbox folder so they didn't even need FTP but life... It was in PHP, which at the time, all ISPs supported. Setup was: copy code, change files/folders in `/content` dir and your away.

majicDave 9mo ago

We share many of the same ideas, I am working on a solution, a new type of internet with a new type of browser, and it is going quite well. Something like this can really make a difference I think, it’s definitely possible. https://github.com/mjdave/katipo https://github.com/mjdave/katipo

ericyd 9mo ago

Mobile users hate when site publishers forget this one simple ~trick~ meta tag.

dpc_01234 9mo ago

It's easier than ever to build p2p software. E.g. You can use Pkarr as a distributed identity system, and Iroh for reliable p2p connectivity. There's no point in messing with custom hardware, etc. We could host bunch of redundant p2p access points for everyone, and use p2p portable software for everything. E.g. I'm building a P2P/F2F Social Media protocol that is very close to syndication platform. https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.dpc.pw/rad:zzK566qFsZnXomX2juRjxj9K1LuF https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.dpc.pw/rad:zzK566qFsZn... . I'm not saying that it's exactly the same thing as author is looking for, but the technical bits and even functionality are very close.

etothepii 9mo ago

Can someone explain to me what the difference is between a union in which everyone is a member and a government.

zkmon 9mo ago

Publishing markup content is not the problem world needs solving. Infact there is no problem with web that applies to all users of the web. Most are just consumers of the content. Mostly non-text content. I guess the author first need to get some stats on content type, use cases, money flows, controls etc and then define the problem that applies to most users of the web. Keep in mind that, usually a system that evolves through feedback loops, and shaped by forces, doesn't have a major problem as it's evolution has ensured the fit between itself and it's context. You may call the forces which shape that evolution as evil. But the forces are part of the context that you need to live with. The forces are also a product of that evolution.

ang_cire 9mo ago
My impression is that the author is not actually speaking to the internet at large, they're just talking to people who are 1) at least a little tech-savvy, and 2) willing to spend time to decouple from big tech. This is just the author building a personal data/ blog tool for their own use, to feel 'safe'. That's why they liken it to their home. This is not a real roadmap (or even completed thought) for people shifting to micro-enclave internet/ networks. That is already happening in many places, and has been for years, often driven by lack of internet infra rollout in low-income areas. It used to be community-installed wiring, but the advent of mesh networking has allowed this to blow up.

curtisblaine 9mo ago

Yes, but: 1) Cooperatives inevitably transition into centers of power. If a cooperative becomes powerful enough, it becomes another mini-government that "unpublishes" you if you say something they don't like. 2) Your freedom ends at the ISP boundary; you don't own the cables. If the ISP doesn't like what you publish, they just disrupt, throttle or disconnect your upload link. They probably have the legal right already. 3) Even if you own the wires (or you invent a LoRa mesh stable enough to provide an alternative Internet), the government will disrupt you (or worse) if you say something they don't like. It's very likely the will disrupt you preventively because you could potentially say something they don't like. This is not right wing vs left wing: look at the UK, for example (left-wing government, abysmal freedom of speech on the Internet) The issue with publishing content has always been censorship. Anyone in power has incentives to apply as much censorship as they can. It's never been a technical problem.

Razengan 9mo ago

> What if I do not wish to be tenant and product? What can I do to change the equation? Host your own website (on a free server for as long as you can), print out some flyers, paste them around town or pass them around (to bypass the Ad Gods), ask for donations to pay the growing costs of bandwidth etc. as you get more users? Ultimately it comes to down to convincing people, the ickiest task on earth :<

DeathArrow 9mo ago

Using Raspberry Pi, $20 network switches and cheap wire won't be useful for building a new Internet. Also, you don't even have the rights to lay 'em wires wherever you see fit.

Garlef 9mo ago

I what the article proposes is the wrong direction: Instead of every single person to maintain an offering a vertical slice through the whole stack, we should make it easier to publish content in the first place. The real issue that this pushes the burden of maintenance and infrastructure on the individual; But this should be a shared responsibility. Instead we need: - A federated content/file system - An open standard for viewer/app definitions (hosted on this system)

dumindunuwan 9mo ago
Ex. Content can be in Git repo. Site can be build via static site generators + automated via CI update site when add new content to Git repo. We only need good blog theme, photo albums theme and profile theme to replace FB, Linkedin even TikTok. Publishers have full control on their own data.

sylware 9mo ago

What's the article is missing: this is directly related to the complexity of file formats and protocols. There are 2 webs: - the web site, to serve noscript/basic (x)html, namely basic HTML forms which can be augmented with <video> and <audio> nowadays, namely it serves web _pages_. It was made super modular, you have browsers not handling CSS, and it is fine for _pages_ with a semantic 2D table (implicit navigation even for braille browsers). Web engines there, are more than reasonable to write an alternative of, even a plain CSS renderer (look at netsurf browser), only text (lynx/edbrowse/etc), graphic (links2/elinks/etc). In the end, 'HTML' is not perfect (like CSS), a bit of a mess actually, that's why they tried an XML representation, a failure because it was literaly sabotaged by... "Big Co" or in the web realm, the 'whatng cartel': I remember their web engines were a pain to use xhtml to develop even a simple page... but not with html... curiously. That said, mistakes were made also on the "w3c" side: the 'semantic web', a real abomination of delirious complexity, which I think is what actually made people jump on the "whatng" train, what a disaster. Now, HTML has been back with its weird(shabby?) parsing, but this was kind of 'cleaned up' and much more rigorously defined. - the web app: the abomination. Basically, only gigantic and insanely complex software can make a web app work (including their SDK), aka only the web engines from Big Co, here 'the whatng cartel'. It is getting worse, it is said web apps are more and more requiring only one web engine to 'properly work' (often gogol blink), and suspicions are very strong at this is made _on purpose_ (I remember the day when gmail.com did disable their noscript/basic (x)html web interface... then POP3 not a long time ago... I guess you all see where this is going). In this realm, there is near ZERO possibility to create a _real-life_ alternative without a bunch a developers laser focused on that for one billion years. I have been wishing for an alternative web engine I could build from source with a simple SDK, does not exist, and even the few attempts here and there are _not_ doing that: they lean towards super complex syntax computer languages (c++ and similar), hence a failure right from the start. The 'web3'? A lean javascript engine (for instance quickjs, but there are others), with a small set of OS basic abstraction APIs, and a few 'accelerated' specialized APIs (vector drawing, pixel drawing blitter, video decoding, glyph drawing, etc). First problem: nobody will agree an those interfaces (they would have to be as simple as possible), and the 'whatng cartel' will make sure their are useless... Or a even simpler "HTML" (probably the same with CSS)? "markdown" like the article suggest? Would it have enough expressive power? Again, nobody will agree on the format and will want to make its own. A good middle ground is to work with a 'subset' of HTML: rought on the edge, but would do a good enough job for nearly all online services out-there, whatever the platform. Nearly 100% of the online services were running on that a few years back, and with <video> and <audio>, it could be even closer than 100% nowadays. And there is the danger of the 'mobile app only': there, the only way out is to regulate and enforce the availability of a small, stable in time, set of as simple as possible protocols and file formats to allow reasonable efforts at developping an 'app' for an alternative platform (elf/linux, *BSD, fooOS, etc).

wkrsz 9mo ago

My concern is that when we succeed making "our own web" popular, the Big Cos will lobby for legislation that would put burden on all operators, such that it would be unreasonably costly for small operators but easy for themselves to meet. Probably under disguise of "think of the children". Besides technology we'd need a strong organization advocating for "our own web".

ang_cire 9mo ago
That is already happening, but this is where peer-to-peer becomes helpful, because in order for 'Big Cos' and 'Big Gub' to audit your web they have to have visibility into it in the first place.
- wkrsz 9mo ago
  I'm thinking more of situation where definitions of mass-media are extended to cover individual bloggers. > Professional influencers with over 500,000 followers fall under the Dutch Media Act (Mediawet, 2008) and are supervised by the media authority CvDM, which applies rules similar to those for on-demand audiovisual media services, including requirements on recognizable advertising and protection of minors. https://cmpf.eui.eu/influencers-as-news-creators-implications-for-media-regulation/#:~:text=Professional%20influencers%20with%20over%20500%2C000,advertising%20and%20protection%20of%20minors. https://cmpf.eui.eu/influencers-as-news-creators-implication... > Current Rule: Now, influencers with 100,000+ followers (across YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok) who post at least 24 videos a year and earn money must register with the CvdM and pay annual supervision fees. > The Burden: You are expected to know your reach. If you cross the 100,000 mark and fail to register, you are technically in violation. Another example: https://medium.com/michigan-news/proposed-florida-blogging-law-aligns-with-russia-china-and-iran-to-track-sites-a7746a21dfdf https://medium.com/michigan-news/proposed-florida-blogging-l...

squeefers 9mo ago

> think when a significant number of individuals and cooperatives own the hardware and uses simpler software we can impact the Web and Internet in a positive way. That's my hypothesis. this man lives away with the fairies. i need read not a single word more

tlocke 9mo ago

Could IPFS be the solution here? https://ipfs.tech/ https://ipfs.tech/

talkingtab 9mo ago

The top comment (right now) is saying this cannot be done. That is wrong. It is exactly the same as those people who said "We cannot build an internet because of [insert infinity of issues]". The one we are using for this discussion. We live in a time where people somehow think they cannot make bread without a $400 (USD) bread making machine. We suffer from learned helplessness, paint-by-number syndrome, follow-the-leader syndrome, and cargo-cult thinking. We use recipes instead of developing skills. Implementing "a web we own" is a hard and difficult problem. The poster is correct that ISP's are a problem. But if this learned helplessness is the top comment on "HACKER" News then there is something seriously wrong with how HN works. This is NOT about the commenters. This is about a system of interaction - comments on HN - that seems to promote anything but hacking. My apologies for the "rant" nature of this post, but there is a point here that I believe is worth stating. Or you know, just unfollow me, vote me down, and I probably misspelld some words along the way.

Muhammad523 9mo ago
I agree. (Almost) Every problem that looks impossible to solve actually is not. People should not focus on "Why we cant do this because of current problems." but rather on "How could we possibly do this, considering the current problems?"

econ 9mo ago

Start by making a website that works on mobile. You can't just talk to part of the audience.

econ 9mo ago
You can't sell a product or an idea and put random nonsensical limitations on who may buy or listen to it.

thesuitonym 9mo ago

Right of the bat, first sentence already bugs me. I hate this "woe is meeee the web is centralized" nonsense. No, the WWW is not owned by big companies, you have decided to only go to web sites owned by big companies. You might be able to make the argument that the Internet is owned by a few big companies, depending on what you consider the Internet to be (Is it the physical hardware, or the content that passes through the hardware?), but the web? The World Wide Web? What are you even talking about? Of course, I am asking bad faith questions here. I know the author is fully aware that the WWW is free and available to all. I don't assume any maliciousness here, but the author is not being honest about their intent. They know you can just put a website out there, but that's not the problem. The problem is that they won't get 2.5 million views, 100,000 interactions, and 1000 comments. They want a more open web, like it was back in the day. But then you remind them that back then having 1000 views on your entire site (let alone any single page) was considered successful, and that's not what they meant. The problem is that everyone wants to eat their cake and have it, too. You either get a small web, where page views are counted in the hundreds, or you get locked into the big players and get the views you want. I, for one, choose the former.

zeckalpha 9mo ago

This sounds a lot like the philosophy behind Gemini protocol. I would recommend the author take a look at that.

sh2p 9mo ago