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Show HN: s@: decentralized social networking over static sites
- superkuh 7mo agosatproto's implementation involves complex cryptographic signing and that makes it very not static. One needs to run a program of some sort to use satproto. The only static part is that the json that's operated upon. This is not true of indieweb's web mention: https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention It just uses HTTP POST (like pingback/trackback/etc, except it has a second step verifying the page sending the webmention actually has a link to a URL on the website). You can them them with a browser or cURL or some complex backend script. Receiving them is as easy as logging POSTs to a specific URL endpoint or even using someone else's community backend your site interfaces with via javascript (ie, https://webmention.io/ https://webmention.io/ - not static since it uses JS). Or anything in between. Totally decentralized and very simple. I implemented a simple nginx POST logging format in the config to receive on my static site. And HTML forms on my static site can send. http://superkuh.com/blog/2019-12-11-3.html http://superkuh.com/blog/2019-12-11-3.html
- isodev 7mo agoWebmention is cool indeed. Also one of few techniques that’s currently free of some corp’s greedy roadmap
- nunobrito 7mo agoIs spam a thing on webmention? Have the impression it is easy for spammers to generate webmentions to get attention.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- koolala 7mo agoI wonder what the signing is for if you already have a domain name to verify your authorship.
- Retr0id 7mo agoIt doesn't use signing, aside from the signing that exists within TLS
- notpushkin 7mo agoI think they mean in s@. ...which doesn’t do signing, but does do E2E encryption? So it’s more like DMs-over-HTTPS.
- dharmatech 7mo agoSee also org social: https://github.com/tanrax/org-social https://github.com/tanrax/org-social
- iamnothere 7mo agoThanks for this, nice concept. This would be good on a Tor onion service.
- est 7mo agoSeems a bit complicated. Why not use git for social networking ;) https://github.com/est/gitweets https://github.com/est/gitweets
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago[flagged]
- Retr0id 7mo agoI wish I could share a graph of my eyebrow height over time as I read through this part: > sAT Protocol (s@) is a decentralized social networking protocol based on static sites. Each user owns a static website storing all their data in encrypted JSON stores.
- Retr0id 7mo agoBut in all fairness it seems like a reasonable system, given the narrow scope of its goals. It does not scale, but that's on purpose. Although I could still see "Feed Aggregation" becoming impractical even with a small number of friends with a modest number of posts. Cryptographically, a problem is that it makes ciphertexts publicly enumerable, protected by a X25519-derived key. This makes it very vulnerable to harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks, if you believe quantum computing will ever happen.
- bigiain 7mo ago> if you believe quantum computing will ever happen. ... and you don't believe that everything will be totally fucked when it does happen. If there is a global passive observer, and they get quantum computing, a huge amount of supposedly encrypted private information just got popped. Whether or not I care about my dinky little private social network posts when every ssl/tls connection I've ever made is being cracked and data mined is an interesting question.
- RobRivera 7mo agoSo a database, that you can send a network response or request with that data, that when received by a client, builds a static website. I see. I see...
- behehebd 7mo ago> Key Rotation (Unfollow) _ / . .
- nine_k 7mo agoYour app picks up a bunch of feeds and composes them into a nice page for you, much like an RSS feed reader. The twist is that each feed is encrypted in a way that only you can decrypt, so the cryptography also gives strong identity guarantees, and allows for private messaging. It's basically PGP + RSS, only mapped to a bunch of files of specific structure. Those could be RSS/ATOM feeds instead of JSON, to reuse an existing format. The reuse of the ideas is good, these ideas are time-proven. As any PGP-lookalike, this thing has the key distribution problem, and won't scale to billions of users due to that. Key rotation and revocation is another problem. But for a small-scale network it should be fine, and can run on very tiny, very low-power devices, maybe even with intermittent connectivity.
- vexnull 7mo ago[dead]
- iamnothere 7mo agoDoes the polling need to be fast? I think back to mailing lists and the huge delays involved in those conversations. Yet they were/are often very productive. Somewhere between Twitter/X speed and mailing list speed might be acceptable. Maybe this would be better with a LiveJournal style interface. Medium length posts with threaded comments/replies are an underrated format.
- bandrami 7mo agoMaybe that's a feature rather than a bug
- 8organicbits 7mo agoThat should scale pretty well. The HTTP fetch of posts/index.json could use conditional get requests to avoid downloading the body when there are no changes. Static files are dirt cheap to serve.
- koolala 7mo agoSigned JSON reminds me of Nostr. I wish Nostr was somehow more mainstream.
- lovvtide 7mo agoI laughed when I saw this because two years ago I built a nostr client called Satellite! https://satellite.earth/ https://satellite.earth/
- iamnothere 7mo agoSatellite is great, thanks for making it. Glad to see you on here.
- lovvtide 7mo agoWhat's your npub?
- iamnothere 7mo agoI maintain hard separation of all identities from platform to platform, to maintain a degree of anonymity. You may see me around though :)
- lovvtide 7mo agoSmart move tbh
- _pdp_ 7mo agoLong ago there was this thing called foaf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF and also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback ... it was the closest I've seen to completely decentralised social media.
- notpushkin 7mo agoWebmention is the modern counterpart: https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention (The IndieWeb wiki is probably the best resource for exploring the personal website-based social networking tech nowadays. I recommend the author check it out and maybe iterate on that instead :)
- anentropic 7mo agoIs any of this stuff sort of out there working and I maybe used it without realising? Or it's all super niche for "personal website-based social networking" enthusiasts and never took off, because big players didn't implement it and we need them to, or whatever?
- riffraff 7mo agoDon't forget XFN! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Friends_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_Friends_Network
- extraduder_ire 7mo agoSeems like a missed opportunity to not put a /satellite/satproto.json file on that site.
- evbogue 7mo agoThis obviously needs some iteration on the protocol design as other commenters have mentioned, but I'd still be up for partnering up over here at https://anproto.com/ https://anproto.com/
- Retr0id 7mo agoThis seems like a thin wrapper around libsodium, maybe I lack imagination but it's hard to see it as a protocol. On wiredove I see people posting with handles and profile pictures, where is that defined?
- neilv 7mo ago> By convention, the client looks under /satellite/ by default. If that path is already taken, place a satproto_root.json file at the domain root containing { "sat_root": "my-custom-repo" } — the client checks this first. Would a `/.well-known/` be helpful here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-known_URI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-known_URI
- noman-land 7mo ago.poorly-known
- 9dev 7mo agoUnfortunately. It's a great solution to a problem lots of tools face. A pity that people trying to establish new standards aren't aware of it aparently.
- extraduder_ire 7mo agoI'm a little disappointed there's no standard for /.well-known/list that points to things made available under /.well-known/ on that domain. Doesn't need to be everything, just ones you want discoverable. Only other way to do it is trying every one you know.
- 9dev 7mo agoGood idea actually. You could just make /.well-known an index page
- chrismorgan 7mo agoAh, just like AT Proto when it was released, introducing compatibility hazards and security vulnerabilities by putting stuff in the root rather than in .well-known. Sigh.
- pfraze 7mo agoDid we?
- flaxxer 7mo agoNostr https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/
- DANmode 7mo agoReal question for people who know what they’re talking about: is perfect forward secrecy no longer considered valuable?
- cassonmars 7mo agoPFS is valuable largely in stable, small groups that rarely change shape or association. PFS in an open, freely-associable environment is far more complicated when you move beyond even the smallest of group sizes. Realistically, once the group size is beyond Dunbar's number you can reasonably assume that PFS is moot, because you no longer can depend on maybe four or five people's personal security, but 150+. Statistically, someone's opsec failure will be guaranteed.
- givemeethekeys 7mo agoThis needs a YouTube demo video.
- MattCruikshank 7mo agoAmazing. I'm building almost the exact same thing. I'll share mine when it's mature enough. :D
- kennywinker 7mo agoThis suffers from the same problem that so so so many alternative social, federated, self-hosted ideas suffer from. Matrix, keybase, pgp, etc. It’s too dependant on encryption. Yes, it’s a cool technical feat that stuff can be in the open but also private - but: 1. I want to be able to follow my freinds if my phone dies and i have to get a new one. 2. I am very technical, and idk exactly what a X25519 keypair is. I would like for people to come up with more stuff like this that is designed for small communities but not for very secure communication. Like I want something where it’s secured by a username and password, that i give to a server i am registered with - and that server handles the encryption business. If the server rotates keys, that’s for the admin to figure out and exchange keys with sibling servers. Idk I’m just making up specifics but this is the kind of ethos i think is needed to make things that can be successful with non-technical people in a way that can unseat big tech. In case i sound too critical - this is cool. It just isn’t something i can use with family and friends to replace facebook or even email.
- remywang 7mo ago1. Right after initialization you'll be prompted to export the private key and store it somewhere safe, e.g. your password manager 2. You don't need to know unless you want to implement the protocol! To use (the very barebones) implementation all you need to do is fork the repo & give access, which I admit can be too much for family/friends so you might have to set it up for them (and I bet they'd be stoked to have a website of their own!)
- pibaker 7mo ago> Right after initialization you'll be prompted to export the private key and store it somewhere safe, e.g. your password manager Having seen enough story in the vein of "if only I still have my bitcoin wallet from 2014" and "our storage server failed and when we tried to restore from backup we found out our last working backup was from two years ago," I have to say I have a rather dim view of how competent people actually are when it comes to keeping backups working. I am not saying cryptography isn't useful for safeguarding your data, I just think for perhaps 90% of the users out here the risk of being locked out of your data permanently is more realistic than your data being accessed by a bad actor. > which I admit can be too much for family/friends so you might have to set it up for them (and I bet they'd be stoked to have a website of their own!) From reading the website, I was under the impression this is a techie oriented project still looking for technically inclined early adopters instead of something you can readily tell grandma to hop on. I sincerely doubt the average friend and family member who needs other's help to set up a personal website knows what the protocol does or why should he or she use it instead of Instagram or Facebook, or Signal, if the point is just to keep in touch with people you already know.
- lovvtide 7mo agoFunny to see people mention nostr https://satellite.earth/ https://satellite.earth/ (Satellite nostr client) https://nsite.run/ https://nsite.run/ (literally static sites on nostr)
- theamk 7mo ago> The private key is stored in the browser’s localStorage. Woah.. when will those people learn? _Any_ browser storage is unreliable. Anything goes wrong with your web experience? Clear browser settings. Make new profile. Re-install browser. The browser's localStorage is not a replacement for filesystem. It cannot be backed up, it is super volatile, and it should _never_ be used for anything important. It's one of those "worst of both world" cases, where malware can access it with no problem, while legitimate backup programs are locked out. (And yes, the post mentions "new device" flow, but how many people would (1) remember to export their private key and (2) won't lose it with their device? I bet in practice people will use the network until the first time localStorage is lost, and then they will get annoyed that their feeds are lost forever, and will likely leave the network for good)
- parasti 7mo agoNot in disagreement, but based on how casually the frontpage throws around terms like "X25519 keypair", it is obvious that mass adoption and ease of use aren't among the goals of this project. Looks more like an exploration of a concept - can a social network viably exist without any middlemen in between.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago> It's one of those "worst of both world" cases It's also one of those cases where "perfect is the enemy of good enough", and also very easy to solve, offer a download/upload button that offers you to save the key, or upload a arbitrary one. Now every issue you mention disappears, and it's maybe ~50 lines of code... And yes, loosing keys can mean you lose access. People who used 2FA are well aware of this problem, and yes it requires diligence. Also people who maintain their own cryptocurrency wallets seems to be able to handle this too, so not like it's completely impossible, just infeasible for the average Joe.
- theamk 7mo agoWell-known 2FA-using services (Google, Paypal, Github) etc.. offer some way to recover your account, so losing your 2FA device does not mean you lose all access. Pretty sure that the only people who use un-recoverable private keys are crypto-wallet users, and even they regularly lose access, despite having strong monetary incentive to keep backups. Now of course it's all open source, and authors can implement whatever they want, including things like: "It's your own fault that you did not do that backup procedure correctly, the button was _right there_. Serves you right that you have lost your account, maybe you did not deserve it in the first place." But that may be no the best approach if you want to create something that people actually use...
- Goofy_Coyote 7mo agoVery interesting idea, love the simplicity. Question about this: “Threads are positioned in the timeline by the original post’s created_at; replies within a thread are sorted by their own created_at ascending.” Does this mean, I, as the person replying to the post can manipulate my reply time to say, 3 minutes before person X’s reply? If so, I can imagine a few adversarial ways of (ab)using this. I understand this is more for friend groups, just curious if my understanding is correct.
- remywang 7mo agoYes that's correct. edit: I guess an easy fix is to append a cryptographic hash to the post ID, but yeah currently I'm assuming you trust your friends.
- wordglyph 7mo agohave you considered Replace X25519 with a post quantum cryptography key encapsulation mechanism like kyber or saber?
- brunoborges 7mo agoOctoTown: https://octotown.github.io/ https://octotown.github.io/
- Uptrenda 7mo agoThe client fetches the pub key off the server which is decentralized? There's no part in the protocol that authenticates whether or not a pub key is legit. If its replaced by an attacker and someone subsequently goes to fetch a key they can read those messages. I mean, pub key infrastructure is meant to solve that. With SSL and such... that's why you its a federated chain of certificates with providers vouching that names = pub keys. This is a very common problem. There is potential to possibly make this more decentralized with smart card technology. Like imagine a smart phone with access to pub keys in the hardware tied to an account cryptographically. Then you can say something like phone number = subscriber = pub key. Encrypted messaging apps seem to bootstrap off of ownership for numbers in the mobile system (mobile system security is very bad so there are dragons here.) The other apps like pidgin with OTR plugins they have unique phrases that help with the issue. When you start looking at decentralized pub key infrastructure tied to human-meaningful names you start to run into zookos triangle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle human-meaningful, decentralized, secure -- pick two
- James_K 7mo agoJust use RSS at that point. I don't see the value of encrypting everything, like people are gonna be spying on your random static blog entries.
- 8organicbits 7mo agoThese days people are fearful of their work ending up in LLM training datasets. A private, but static hosted website is on a lot of people's minds. Most social networks have privacy setting these days, which feels like a missing feature of standard, static blogs.
- txrx0000 7mo agoGlad to see more of these efforts. But here's what it will really take to decentralize social media and E2EE messengers: We need something like Discord, except each server is an actual self-hosted server like a Minecraft server. DMs between two users should be handled by a mutual server. Account credentials should be handled by a Nostr-like protocol, which also gives you global tweeting capabilities as a bonus. Run the whole thing on Yggdrasil Network or something similar so that it's not tied down to IPv4v6 and DNS and all existing hardware infra, but can still take advantage of them. And add reciprocal inter-server onion routing to make it difficult to geolocate servers. Also take a page from SoftEther VPN's book and wrap all traffic in HTTPS and perform automatic NAT traversal, so that people can host servers from behind ISP firewalls. Anything short of that and we lose to big tech and govs in the long run. But once we've achieved the above, the decentralized web can truly take off: we will get WiFi routers running open-source firmware to make a mesh network to act as alternative physical layer infra for the new web. We can still take advantage of the existing Internet's bandwidth as long as there's an unblockable path to send a little bit of data to discover and coordinate nodes.
- basch 7mo agoI guess I’d rather have something approaching bittorrent, edonkey/kad, ipfs, blockchain, webarchives. You have named networks that are federated together, and people can publish to the networks they are invited to or sign up for. The networks survive even with individual servers go down. Data is cached all over at the edges. Your version is just way too susceptible to rot, unless you see that as a feature. I see it as most of the good content falling into the ether sooner rather than later. Also can use people viewing the pages as hosts https://gabe.durazo.us/tech/ephemeral-p2p-project/ https://gabe.durazo.us/tech/ephemeral-p2p-project/
- konfuzio 7mo agoI think: A new way of old school forum would bring real UGC rel="ugc" that brings value to human and agentic readers. Let's crash the fediverse! https://wire.wise-relations.com/ https://wire.wise-relations.com/
- serial_dev 7mo agoIt would be nice to start with what this actually is from the user’s point of view. Forking, paths, JSON, decentralized, encryption, key rotation, etc and I still have no idea why I would bother and who else could use it (a decentralized social network is only so much fun if you are the only one on it).
- bigiain 7mo agoI can think of at least a couple of dozen fairly technical friends who'd be capable enough to set this up themselves, and who're at least adjacently interested in recreational paranoia. And probably another dozen or two who're definitely into recreational (or possibly delusional and/or fully deserved paranoia) who'd be willing to learn or get help setting this up. Right now, those circles of friends are _reasonable_ well served with some combination of Mastodon (effectively zero security but with decent findability) and Signal (much more limited mostly to only people you'd be OK with having your phone number). I will definitely take this for a spin, and start having discussions with particular groups of friends to see it I get any traction.
- 5o1ecist 7mo ago[dead]
- esjeon 7mo agoA bit of an off-topic, but the social networking protocol should never be designed for the sake of the protocol itself, or it’ll not enjoy the networking effect. A protocol must offer direct benefits to users, so that they keep participating in the network. This participation is what eventually forms the network of people, a.k.a, society. I always pick BitTorrent as the most successful example of such networking protocol - people just wanted to download stuffs (e.g. movies and pxxxs) but ends up participating in the sharing network. Personally, I think a possible angle of attack for a new practical social network protocol is data management, as the amount of data people generate, consume, store, and share is enormous these days. More like, manage data conveniently, and share them easily as a side-effect.
- Aloha 7mo agoI think a good protocol however is key for adoption. Many a good idea has died an early death because the implementation of it was, too complex, insufficiently robust, or poorly thought out for the future.
- vividfrier 7mo ago[flagged]
- naasking 7mo ago> I ended up forgetting to visit Lemmy or Pixelfed or <whatever> because I had 2-3 times when I opened up the app and saw the exact same content, giving me a feeling of "nothing is happening here" and thus, I didn't need to check in. I think this is the point the OP is making though, there's little to no actual benefit if the content doesn't change often. You probably never forget to check HN for example. An RSS reader linked to this via a browser extension might be a more useful interface for feeds that aren't updated as frequently.
- vaylian 7mo agoThis is intriguing. But I wish there was a rationale/philosophy document on that site, that explains what the intentions and use-cases behind this project are. Given that cryptography is such a fundamental part of the design, I wonder if public posts are not desired.
- mkfain 7mo agoI'm curious why not use Nostr?
- dwedge 7mo agoUnless this is just a PoC, you could benefit from a discovery mechanism. As much as that sounds like a webring for github, I'm probably not going to deploy a social network without knowing if anyone else is using it.
- builderhq_io 7mo ago[flagged]
- grigio 7mo agonice, RSS is a cool under used technology
- talkingtab 7mo agoThe concept is good. It is in the right direction. I think it needs to not have a dependence on github. This is a microsoft thing, and at best it means this will become another way for a corporation to make money from people. Speaking of money, it needs to be paid for. (The github part is free from Microsloth and so is NOT free). So how do you pay for this? Micropayments. So we need a system of micropayments. Then we need it to provide a way to help people economically. These are not barriers, because this is hacker news, instead this is an accurate understanding of more of the problem. People keep talking about a collaborative internet without using the term. But to be clear we are talking about a fundamentally different kind of internet. That we can build.
- krapp 7mo agoIt doesn't really seem to have a dependence on github, so much as a dependence on git. You can push to a git repo anywhere, even publish a site with it. For example the method I've used is no longer documented on the open web but an archive is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220817005415/https://neurobin.org/docs/web/using-git-to-manage-a-website#expand https://web.archive.org/web/20220817005415/https://neurobin.... Also I think you're confusing "free as in beer" and "free as in free" here. The last thing any alternative social network needs is to bake capitalist incentives into the model, as that would just lead to everything optimizing for the same dark patterns and influencer garbage people want to avoid. There already exist plenty of ways to help people economically.
- andros 7mo agoIt reminds me a lot of Org Social
- hxii 7mo agoSo, in essence this is very, very similar to TWTXT (https://github.com/buckket/twtxt https://github.com/buckket/twtxt). I'd imagine that similarly to TWTXT, this suffers from the same accessibility and barrier of entry issues. It's one thing when all you have to do is type text in a textbox and click "Submit", but it's a whole thing entirely when you have to screw around with updating your website to do anything.
- 1dom 7mo agoI really like solutions in this space, and this is quite nice. Seeing people try create solutions like this really tickles my brain a lot. Even if I think more into it and conclude it has catastrophic issues, I still really get a weird kick learning about novel decentralised networks. I really can't explain it. Fancy combinations of encryption and decentralisation just really do it for me, to an abnormal and uncomfortable extent. Hopefully someone else relates to this. Anyway, I really like this idea, it's cool. When I think about this one though, I feel there's too much friction in the follow/unfollow process. Having unfollowing requiring reenecrypting and rebuilding the entire website for everyone seems cumbersome. It's not a killer in itself, but combined with this: > If the original post is inaccessible (e.g. the viewer doesn’t follow the author), the reply is hidden entirely. A user only sees replies from people they follow — this is the spam prevention mechanism. I think this is going to prevent it from scaling in any desirable way. I know it's not intended to scale, and is targetted at smaller freinds networks, not influencers, but again, even small friendship networks grow complex, and I can see the experience on S@t turning into the worst parts of activitypub where you can only read half of the interesting replies because not being friends, and it being a pain to then become mutual friends. But, I really, really do like that s@t feels like a combination of RSS, activity pub and static sites, having a browser heavy client is interesting to. It does feel a bit like s@t wants stuff to be easily locked down between a dynamic list of friends though, and it feels a bit weird to have the foundational tech of such a protocol be static sites, which by definition make it hard to lock stuff down to a dynamic list of friends. Hmmmm, I really do love/hate static site architecture This is nice though, thanks for sharing.
- komako 7mo agoI wonder if the missing piece here is an agent layer. A lot of decentralized/local-first social projects improve the protocol story, but the UX is still "please think about keys, storage, sync, exports, and trust boundaries yourself." That's fine for hackers, not for most users. Something Claude Code-like, but local-first and protocol-aware, could make this much more approachable. The user says "post this to close friends" and the local agent handles signing, encryption, storage, syncing, and recovery. That doesn't solve discovery, spam, or network effects, but it might solve a lot of the usability problem.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- mattkevan 7mo agoI built something similar to this. It's a SSG and CMS that runs in the browser and publishes the raw Markdown and JSON metadata alongside the rendered HTML. Unlike this it doesn't use encryption as it only publishes public data. As the source is available, other clients can easily parse the data so that content can be made available beyond the browser, such as text-only clients, indexing and discovery networks and custom readers. I've built a prototype terminal client to test this out. Now that the editor is working, my plans are to add public follow/block/like lists to sites to add a lightweight social layer and to build an open indexer framework for content discovery. It's not trying to be another social network protocol. It's first and foremost a publishing platform, designed to be as easy to use as something like Medium while still being simple, open and portable. I'd really appreciate any feedback: https://www.sparktype.org https://www.sparktype.org.
- grumbel 7mo ago> A user’s identity is their domain name. That's dead on arrival. The domain name system is one of the core reasons why everything has become so centralized in the first place. If one wants to fix anything wrong with the Internet, finding a better way to naming things should be the first step.
- yakkomajuri 7mo ago2 years ago I built something I called "social media for blogs" that had some similar ideas. Nothing around encryption though, all on public data. I'd be keen to revisit those ideas and see if they can take shape in another form. MIT licensed if anyone's interested: https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess
- znpy 7mo agoInteresting take but I think the work is, at very best, halfway through. If authors want this to take off they need to work on user experience, particularly for non-technical users. Otherwise it might at best become some tech niche that will eventually die.
- clarkqaq 7mo agoNostr?! https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
- deafpolygon 7mo agoi would prefer to see widespread hosting become cheap and easy to use… as simple as signing up for an account then allow people to blog/post in a standardized format using rss. any other site can then subscribe to that site.
- krapp 7mo ago>I would prefer to see widespread hosting become cheap and easy to use… as simple as signing up for an account It is and has been for years. You can literally just sign up for a shared hosting account on hundreds, possibly thousands of services and put whatever you want online (within legal limits of course.) You can even still use SFTP if you want. People just don't do it anymore, but it's never been less expensive or more accessible.
- deafpolygon 7mo agoi think one of the biggest reason is discoverability… so a solution on this front would need to help solve that to a certain extent beyond just “heres the ftp, here you go”
- krapp 7mo agoOne solution would be to maintain an account on a platform like Mastodon and link to your blog from there. For some reason this has its own acronym (https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE). This is what I do, along with using my blog as a backup for my Mastodon account (because it's a very small account and I have to delete content every couple of weeks) and using Mastodon for comments. Unfortunately I don't think there's anything to be done about discovery on the mainstream web, everything was ruined by SEO before even SEO got ruined by AI. Not being discoverable there is probably better than not.
- selfradiance 7mo ago[flagged]
- ctdinjeu2 7mo ago[dead]
- taintballs69 7mo agoI don’t love well-known for this because it isn’t app- or account-level it’s host-level. And maybe I want 2 of those directories. SSL, file-based verifications, sure. Not for this.
- layer8 7mo agoIt isn’t host-level, it’s domain-and-port-level. You can use multiple domains or subdomains and ports.
- taintballs69 7mo agoOk it's domain/port level - the problem is the same. Do you even get the problem?
- bschmidt25000 7mo ago[dead]
- sriramgonella 7mo ago[flagged]
- lilnigga 7mo ago[flagged]
- lilnigga 7mo ago[flagged]
- lilnigga 7mo ago[dead]
- theknarf 7mo agoWhy not at the every least use RSS for Posts? Why invent a new json spec? Wouldn't it make more sense to build this around RSS?
- 42069party 7mo ago[dead]
- ptak_dev 7mo ago[flagged]
- turlockmike 7mo agoIsn't this just RSS with extra steps?
- giaour 7mo agoYes, but there is protocol-level support for "commenting" on a friend's post via a post of your own.
- irenetusuq 7mo ago[dead]