If this were true, SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like MySpace.
My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice. People RUSHED into MySpace when it got hot partly because of this.
Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or directors because they love TV or movies (though this is definitely a bigger pipeline than tech); they just want The Avengers or Real Housewives or whatever.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.
> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming.
Strong disagree. People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation. When you "consume" content on Facebook or Twitter, you can produce content and reasonably expect to get an audience - because you know there's other people there.
If you have your own personal website, you have no natural audience. If you're lucky, Google might like it and return it. But chances are, it won't thanks to SEO. And even if you do, you don't have any replies. A voice shouting into a void, signifying nothing. At that point, you need a blogging engine that allows for replies, and now you're in the world of off-the-shelf solutions. Not so far from Facebook or MySpace, which gets you your audience.
People want to mindlessly scroll, a very low energy form of participation. At the end of the day, a very very small percentage of the users are creating content on a regular basis. You can't ignore the things that you give up by opting into a mass scale product, privacy, security, etc...
With a personal website, everything does become harder, but it ends up being your space and only your space. We've become accustomed to going viral and now no one can settle for having 50 consistent readers because that just seems so insignificant.
> People want to mindlessly scroll, a very low energy form of participation.
If you ask 1000 people that have been mindlessly scrolling for the past 3 hours if they wish they'd done something else, I'm guessing most of them would say yes.
Leaving comments is a different kind of participation than curating a personal website. The assertion originally under discussion here (a few posts back) is that most people don't care to curate their own personal website, or, really, any sort of distinguished online identity. I think that is true. Most people are on Facebook/Instagram/Nextdoor/whatever are doom scrolling it, not trying to become an influencer. The assortment of people leaving comments on NYT, Amazon reviews, or chattering on a forum somewhere, or whatever else, are doing just that, but not trying to drive traffic to their personal home page.
Back when there was a lot of push back against a certain CEO redditors didn't like, that CEO noted that the ratio of commenters:viewers was like 1:1000. I personally know many people who created reddit accounts only because they were forced to by the app, but still have never posted a comment or even upvoted something (intentionally).
I think it's closer to "people are willing to sacrifice some culture for convenience, until it destroys all the culture"
I think we are reaching the point where it's been hollowed out enough that there is finally showing some pushback against it, many asking if the convenience or access to audience is still worth the cultural sacrifices we give for it.
That said the demographics of most things are ballpark <10% produce content, <20% interact with content or comment and the rest >70% just consume content, and this seems to be roughly true ranging from websites to video games (change interact to multiplayer and produce to things like YouTubers or Bloggers about it)
> People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation.
No, most of them don't:
> the 1% rule is a general rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.
The page you linked directly contradicts your interpretation:
> The 1% rule is often misunderstood to apply to the Internet in general, but it applies more specifically to any given Internet community. It is for this reason that one can see evidence for the 1% principle on many websites, but aggregated together one can see a different distribution. This latter distribution is still unknown and likely to shift, but various researchers and pundits have speculated on how to characterize the sum total of participation. Research in late 2012 suggested that only 23% of the population (rather than 90 percent) could properly be classified as lurkers, while 17% of the population could be classified as intense contributors of content.[9] Several years prior, results were reported on a sample of students from Chicago where 60 percent of the sample created content in some form.
This sort of "1% rule" claim, and other versions of it made by others who have replied, is not a possible counterargument to my claim. Moreover, behavior isn't the same as desire. It's ridiculous to say that Trump didn't want a second term as president just because he didn't get one, and it's not less ridiculous to say that a person doesn't want to post content on the internet just because they didn't post content on your website.
But more fundamentally it goes nowhere towards the "be part of a conversation" bit. "People want to participate, they want to be part of a conversation" means that, while it is true of people in general, it is truer of people who post content. The people who post content want dialogue, so they're going to post where they can get feedback. They don't want to just speak into a void. The rest of my comment can only have made sense if it was a general truth and its application to those who actually create internet content (even just a small throwaway comment like this).
Your kind of argument simply doesn't explain the death of the private website and the growth of social networks. It also doesn't explain why what grew up is interactive networks, not news aggregators.
I think you are partially right, but I also think that people are willing to participate as long as it's low effort relative to their consumption or the expected value warrants investing more effort (i.e. why many teens want to be influencers).
Adding a heart reaction to an Instagram post is much easier than creating that Instagram post, though Instagram has made this very easy to do as well, which is easier still than creating a YouTube video, which is easier than updating a web page on SquareSpace.
browsers can still talk HTTP/0.9 and HTTP/1.0 (though they largely don't want to, for good reasons) and HTML still works! i loved (LOVED) the old Internet, but time has moved on.
that said, Hugo is amazing and I absolutely love it!
sidebar now that I'm on this soapbox. i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge.
The desktop OS is a dying product. If everyone could do their work on their phones and tablets, they would. And that is happening now that iDevices are becoming significantly more capable and microsoft seems to be throwing less weight at moving Windows licenses.
alas, if this is true, it makes so much more sense to throw significant resources at making phones and tablets the best they can be instead of shoehorning a dying desktop experience into a mobile factor (something that's been tried way too many times before)
For now. It won't be too many years before the mega-corp browsers not only drop early HTTP support but they drop HTTP/1.1 too. They'll do this in the name of "security". And then all that Chrome based browsers will support will be their very own invented and open-washed QUIC in the form of HTTP/3 and hosting a personal website visitable by a random person will not be possible without continued permission from an incorporated entity. HTTP/3 implementations by Google so far have made it so that Chrome CANNOT establish a connection without a proper certificate authority based TLS certificate. I give this change about 3 years.
You can argue that you can always get a CA TLS cert from another entity if, say, the incredible centralization of all the personal web into LetsEncrypt somehow goes bad. True enough, but if the pressure group can pressure LE it can probably pressure $otherCA too. And frankly, having to get the continued approval of any incorporated entity to host a website is just not acceptable. LE is currently a benign overlord for good on the web. So was dot Org for many years. But if it's made valuable enough the pressure and corruption will come.
this is exactly what's happening and it can be concerning, but from reading the http/3 spec, i think the changes make a lot of sense.
http/3 is multiplex by default, which lends itself much better to RPC (love it or hate it), and is designed to perform much better over choppy network connections (cellular).
also there is really no good reason to not be on https these days. first, chrome uses system certificate trust stores, and OSes still ship with a healthy set of root CAs. second, LE is only popular because creating certs with literally anyone else (except the cloud providers) is expensive and a huge pain in the ass...but you can still get your own shiny cert issued by DigiCert or whomever. third, every web server has made enabling https on vhosts really easy and almost all servers run on CPUs which do hw-accelerated crypto, so performance hits are negligible these days. fourth, i would personally much rather get a SSL warning when the site I'm visiting isn't who they say they are than get a site that's modified in transit silently without me knowing.
the only thing i use http for these days are super simple local dev sites or for my dummy page for detecting captive portals.
the change that really worries me is chrome going all in on neutering adblockers through manifest v3. that feels hugely anti-consumer to me.
You're missing out on the fact that the de-facto standard which is disappearing is HTTP+HTTPS. Not one or the other. Together they provide security and choice. This is what I hope we all chose to continue supporting. I am not anti-TLS. I'm not even anti-CA TLS. I just think HTTP should be an option.
The only situations where HTTP has reason to be removed entirely are government/corporate/institutional sites with a genuine risk of MITM attacks on login/etc processes. For normal websites (ie, not web applications with accounts) created by humans this makes about as much sense as wearing a bullet proof vest while on the phone; yeah, you're more secure but... it's not actually helping.
Is a proof-less conspiracy statement supposed to be enjoyed and loved? It's more conspiratorial emotion than fact. These "I miss the old internet" posts come up every week or so on HN and are largely all the same conspiracies with slightly different wording and no more proof than before.
I wish I could ignore it. It seems many web designers, even at major companies, don't consider PCs anymore.
Google's new carousel features aren't proper links and don't respond to middle-clicks. If you want to pop out an image into its own tab you have to first click it, then pop it out from their more-info panel.
Azure has similar problems, where listings collapse to nigh unusable sizes on desktop and Ctrl-f is broken horribly since many of their page switches actually just slide the current page to the left while keeping it loaded, so that when you go to search, the interface starts dragging back to hits on the previous page. Not that Ctrl-f really works in the face of the "only load just enough of the content that fits into the undersized box" anyway.
They'll push megabytes of javascript to avoid server-side rendering kilobytes of source, making the whole thing harder to use than it needs to be.
I highly doubt the phone and PC markets will converge any time soon.
Apple has made seemingly made the most progress toward this and it isn't hard to imagine someone plugging their iPhone in to a screen when they arrive at work and resuming their Excel spreadsheet with the connected keyboard, no different than the company-issued laptop today. But I don't see what incentive Apple has to make that a reality when they can keep selling people two separate $1000+ devices.
Edit: I would love to be proven wrong, so any opinions/examples to the contrary are very welcome.
Using tablets or phones doesn't necessarily mean tiny screens--although for the life of me, I can't understand why so few companies have put effort into making a phone with a UI that scales for regular screens. (I know they exist, don't sent me examples, thee point is that there are so few of them."
I got a Galaxy Fold and it's remarkable how much more 'active' work I'm doing on my phone now that I can switch to iPad Mini-sized dimensions and it still fits in the palm of my hand. The narrow screens that 99% of phone users have seem to adversely incentivize shallow, consumption-oriented usage in my case.
With iPadOS 16.2 you’ll be able to connect your M1/M2 iPad to a big monitor via usb-c, use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and it’ll be just like using a laptop.
tbf, a lot of sites i use these days have apps that are better than their web sites from a UX perspective, and the iPad Pro 12.9 I just got has an unbelievably color-accurate XDR display that bests the MacBook Pro 13 I'm trading in for it.
Desktop not a dying product anymore than cars are a dying product. They are undergoing changes (ICE to EV) and there are alternatives (trains) but they're simply not going away. Desktop OS is for creating digital things. Phones are the way to digitize things that have been created outside of the computer. Phones don't have dual 24" monitors. Dual 24" monitors don't fit in your pocket. Different use cases, with a lot of gray area in between.
You’ll be able to connect you’re mobile devices to large screens soon, see the M1/M2 iPads. A lot of professional content creation is already moving to mobile devices like music, 3D design, writing, painting, video shooting and editing, photo shooting and editing. Other professions are also using mobile devices for professional work like inspections, pilots, medical doctors, etc, etc. Soon (already?) more professional work will be done on mobile devices rather than on desktops.
And then there are those of us who positively REVILE the mobile interface. I will continue to use a non-laptop desktop computer until I have no choice.
For me, I turn my telephone on for 2FA challenges, and then turn it off again. I hate those things.
> i think this is 100% the reason why iOS and macOS will never converge.
They will never converge because keeping 100% control over their walled garden is too profitable. Apple makes too much money off tablets and phones through app sales, subscription, control over advertising, etc.
"People only care about consuming" -- it might seem that way to a lazy beholder. The entire digital landscape is engineered for consumption -- of ads, and the products they advertise.
Yet individuals continue to CREATE content on which these parasites piggy-back. We are creatives by nature. The consumption is just one facet; had we built "the internet" out of tools and spaces more suitable for creativity, perhaps this would be more reflected in the general trends. Even now, you can't stem the tide of silly, interesting, creative things people post in these narrow, controlled channels.
Interesting that you left off the qualifier "many", changing the context of OP's statement.
I'll say, talking about "many" in the pool of all Internet users is pretty much meaningless (you can count "many" among any sub-population from a starting population so large), but OP is clearly implying that there are a great deal more consumers than creators out there.
Exactly this. The sort of person who kept a personal Web site in the 90s and 00s is the sort of person who keeps a personal journal. Back then it was a fairly significant outlay of cash (domain name, hosting, etc.) Right around the time these things got significantly cheaper, it also ran up against the competition from siloed services (Twitter, Facebook).
It takes a certain type of person to keep up a personal site that is largely disconnected from a wider audience. The people posting memes, quips and barbs on social media aren't "creative" per se. They're engaging in the dopamine drip machine of social media.
Technical people are more used to this kind of thing, as they are almost forced to delegate their cognitive load onto some sort of medium that they can access so they don't have to remember how to set up load balancing in Docker or whatever.
> SquareSpace would be trading way higher than they are now, Twitter wouldn't exist, and Facebook would look a lot like MySpace.
What is remarkable is that despite trying to wall the garden, the personal website is still a thing.
> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming.
Maybe the era of shifting print, TV and radio to the internet is reaching saturation. You can view the internet as a content distribution system, but that ignores the key difference between internet and broadcast media: it is a two-way communication media.
> My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice.
There were plenty of choices. The big innovation was the social network that allowed people to connect with friends, family, and people with common interests. Now you could write something, take a picture, make a video, whatever, and share it with people who would start communicating with you and form communities around those interests.
> Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.
Most people now communicate via the internet about those non-computer-y interests.
No. 20 years ago people created personal websites because it was a creative endeavor for creative personalities. Creative people are a population minority. Social media took over as the internet population grew because most people value immediate gratification more than personal expression.
I wish there was deep profound social, economic, or behavioral issues at play, but there aren’t. Some people want to build things and others just want to shout into a void or stare at those who do.
> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or directors because they love TV or movies (though this is definitely a bigger pipeline than tech); they just want The Avengers or Real Housewives or whatever.
Is it what they want, or is that only what the market is willing to give them that's profitable? And how much of it is the result of manufactured consent?
In my experience techies often maintain websites for their non-tech hobbies. But non-techies are much more likely to publish about their hobbies via other media like Facebook, Reddit etc. Your tech background drives the choice of medium, if not the choice of content.
Consumption is important, but so is culture. Interaction is a big deal to many people. Look at the dynamics related to notifications, for example. People check in, desire the feedback, that interaction, and they seek more of it, form connections around it, and more.
> Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming.
> Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.
But personal sites don't need to be about web culture per se. The best ones were often about some other interest or perspective that happened to be combined in a person who was also tech-capable enough to share it online. And 15 years ago, if you had some passion, whether that was french cooking or birding or carpentry or something else, a personal website or blog was a pretty good way to share it. But now, you'd get a better audience through sharing that same perspective on social media.
I think the thing that's hard to get on a personal site is the immediate feedback that social media provides. The issue as I see it isn't so much that people only want to consume (that was always the case) but that people creating content are in a numbers-driven competition for eyeballs. Creating and publishing stuff online has been mashed together with status/follower-seeking behaviors, and your own personal site likely doesn't provide the same dopamine hit. Even if you're posting about your latest sewing project, putting it on social media can get you some likes and comments, but putting it on your personal site can feel like talking to an empty room.
And aside from the minor technical challenges of creating your own site, I think people rarely talk about the legal or administrative burdens of creating your own whitelabel place to host your content. Do you want to track how people use your site with some analytics tool? What TOS and cookie opt-outs do you need to provide in that case? Oh, you'd like to have a comments section under your posts? What are the GDPR implications of that? You're publishing online so it's not for "purely personal or household purposes" after-all. What if after your personal project gains an audience, you decide to sell some merch -- then because you're 'a business', what has to change for you to meet CCPA obligations? Whereas if you have just a bunch of social media profiles, you don't control and are not responsible for handling that user data.
Yup. 10 commits, first commit was just 4 days ago. Same with their public website & docs. On Github, it's all barely 4 days old.
Brian Lovin has released his work under the MIT license. AFAIK I believe this leaves it open to others to take the code and just run with it.
Even so, looking at their value proposition, it's just a landing page that leads to https://nymhq.com/join where you can subscribe to a "waiting list" to join a server. They claim "Nym is currently in private beta with limited servers, but is accepting waitlist requests now."
The "showcase" on the front page are just content fodder (AI? Web 2/3/5?) with quick, unstyled instances of their blogging software. The rest of that landing page seems to contain a lot of fluff as well.
Frankly, I'm extremely apprehensive about supporting this.
Had this happen to one of my projects. Someone decided to remove my name from the LICENSE file on their fork. I called them out on it, and they put it back, saying it was a "mistake".
The only thing in the original commit was removing my name. Hard to believe that could occur accidentally.
I think the flaw in this logic is that somehow it's technically hard to start a personal blog, so they invent a technical solution (a better platform). But there are plenty of great platforms that are easy to use, Wix, Squarespace, and Wordpress.com, etc.
The problem isn't technical though, in my opinion, it's social. My working theory is that there are probably the same amount of people or more who were or would be vested in a so-called "personal web" as there were 10 or 20 years ago. But I think that we've all allowed ourselves to be trained that the levels of engagement and web visitors that we would have been happy with 10-20 years ago just doesn't match up to what social platforms can provide, so most people that would have a personal blog just aren't.
I know my personal blog from 20 years ago, which I posted to daily, feels very small and quaint. I also know that I would be disappointed with "engagement."
A more personal web doesn't really need better platforms or tech, it needs a mindset reset.
I think what makes it difficult is that there's a sense that self hosting (or coding in general) is not going to click with you if you aren't already a techie. People just shut down, but its not their fault, that's just what marketing has told them for 25 years. Marketing comes in lying, saying its hard to do these things, that you need to pay someone to hold your hand and keep you safe, and doing otherwise means you are a fool, since they can point to their massive populations of sheep that already believed their lie as some sort of justification for why they are right. In reality, its easy to code. Its easy to set up self hosting. Its easy to write your own html. It probably takes as long for you to get up to speed with the basics of these things as it does for you to learn some gui tool that you have to pay for somehow to do a very limited set of these things.
I think of all my accountant friends, absolute wizards in excel which is no easy feat, who would be able to make money hand over fist if they just took even less time to learn the basics of programming and data science than it did to get so proficient at excel. Unfortunately the big lie of technology has hit them too, and they have convinced themselves that they are somehow mentally unable to understand this stuff, or that they should have gone to school for it and now have no hope of ever learning it, even though their expertise in excel proves they are perfectly capable of learning this sort of stuff if they gave it a chance. It's not harder, its actually easy, 7 year olds can wrap their head around computer code, so that means you can too with just a little bit of patience. Unfortunately patience is also in short supply these days thanks to marketing setting expectations that all good things should be instant gratification or they aren't good at all.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. You're right, basic coding skills are easy to learn. Much like basic accounting, basic DIY skills, pretty much the basics of anything. But not everyone finds it interesting.
I have a friend who's quite technically savvy and has been on the net since the early '90s. He used to maintain a website but once social media came along, he was gone with the wind. I asked him recently if he ever wanted to go back to posting on a personal blog and he said no, he found the minutiae in writing content, hosting, maintaining, etc to be boring and a waste of time even if he was only spending 10 min a week on it, given that he was mostly just interested in interacting in small comment-like bursts on online forums. For chatting with known friends, he's in group chats and Discords. He just doesn't find the value on having a personal website. I suspect most people don't either.
To add to this, centralization has been such a big part of the past 20 years with Social Media that it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle. It has and continues to be an "and" proposition -> social media presence + "personal"/brand/corporate/? website must go hand in hand.
The people who get the flywheel right get an outsized piece of typical mind share and opportunity.
Great idea! But the problem, now, is on the client side. Readers need RSS. This lets authors publish at their own pace (which we can assume is relatively slowly) and doesn't burden the user with checking for new content manually. Of course, Twitter is a de facto RSS feed for some, and several other services (HN included) serve that role to some extent. But for the personal web, for those readers (and writers) of the web, you need RSS.
The other problem is that a lot of writing is just not very good. Perhaps contraversially, I think that too is a tool problem: I've noticed that good authors take more time with their posts, get more feedback from more people, and even go to the trouble of thanking them in the post - which for very popular authors, like pg for example, is quite effective motivation and reward. But most authoring tools don't particularly encourage this behavior, preferring instead to give the author the least resistance possible to publishing.
So, with either the return of Google Reader or equivalent, or the addition of a great RSS reader in Chrome, plus authoring tools that promote collaboration and revision, the personal web can flourish. Until then we'll have to make do with Twitter, etc for RSS and cobble together our own ad hoc editor networks via awkward emails and/or shared google docs.
>Until then we'll have to make do with Twitter, etc for RSS and cobble together our own ad hoc editor networks via awkward emails and/or shared google docs.
Or you can use existing blogware and rss. Plenty of people do use rss still today. Plenty of small and major media websites still offer it. Every few years there's a hn thread something akin to "ask hn: does anyone use rss still" at which point its the most engaged thread on the front page, with nearly all replies either saying that "yes I use it every day," or even "I got to this very thread from an rss feed." Honestly, if you are a blogger and want to select a readership base that has certain characteristics you are interested in (maybe it overlaps with your stereotypical hn user: techie or in the technology industry with more money than the median worker), you should offer an rss feed to capture these readers who might not even bother with platforms like twitter at all.
You know what, you're right. I just installed Opera for the first time, which includes a usable RSS browser. However, only one out of the OP's list of personal websites had an RSS feed!
Opera has a lot of cool features, BTW! In the first 30 minutes I'm much more impressed than I expected. Kind of incredible you can get such great software for free (if not open source). Of course, that probably counts as a red flag in some rational threat-models...
One of two things will happen. Either someone will build a huge business on top of a really great RSS reader, gradually adding features to feeds that customise to compete with substack / twitter etc; until the point where regular old feeds don't work as well, or at all in free readers. This is the IRC to Slack pipeline.
Or, RSS will continue as an important technology, but one that's sidestepped in favour of social networks.
I miss the old web, blogging, deep knowledge and intellectually diverse voices spread and hosted widely. But it stands in contrast to the centralising, oligopolistic tendencies of capitalism, and arguably high technology itself.
The HN zeitgeist (at least as of 2021) was to use a static site generator like Hugo or Jekyll. Why would we want to use Nym — speaking as someone who doesn't use either, that is.
When the itch to "small b blog" (love the term, by the way) came around, I built my own blogging frontend utilising GitHub Gists as the data store[1]. It's been working great so far, and uses basically no resources.
Likewise but with nano for html syntax highlighting. Workflow is write file then reload my browser window. I'm working on a personal website with my resume and projects listed and such in plain html without any css and I'm struggling to imagine why I would want anything more complicated, short of sexier window dressing perhaps or as a proof of work itself that I know how to fiddle with the latest webdev libraries. With plain jane html I can embed images and hyperlinks and format text into nice little bullet points or however. The entire site is about 600kb so far, images included. What more could I possibly want that isn't just cruft?
Replied to the wrong message - but I did something similar here at https://www.jaynicolsmith.com/ (its still messy) - followed a tutorial somewhere and it processes my obsidian.md vault, make a note - push to git - tada - you can steal anything i have used for this from here https://github.com/Jayziv/summer-project
Aside: it would be nice to have geographically local "web-rings". There was a sewing consortium place nearby that I randomly drove by, and also a local quilting specialty shop that I saw, why aren't they all connected to each other in a "makerspace" webring, or "craft" or "art" ring with like waypost signs: "next cool art store 3.5mi thattaway =>"
Same with craft brewing, or scratch bakeries, etc.
Technically it might be "advertising your competition", but in a different light, it's trying to expand the amount of time and $$$ that the target customer group is spending in _any_ of the specialty / niche areas.
Totally agree as someone who has been making personal sites since I was a kid in '98. My latest iteration has been nearly 2 years in the making now. I had a WordPress blog for many years but finally decided it was time as a software developer to have a site that was custom. The core idea of the site is as if you've RDP'd into my Windows 10 machine and can see all my files and apps. Everything runs client side which was also something important to me. If interested please check it out, I nickname it daedalOS and it's also open source.
Personal websites still do live. Here on HN too I have seen blog posts from independent websites/blogs run by individuals. What has changed though is the rapid rise of content platforms like Twitter, Medium, Substack and the likes where the sheer number of posts overwhelm the number of posts individual website owners can produce.
But still the independent websites continue to run and stay alive. Some of them have quality content too and appear on HN many times.
Is there a community/forum/channel of these independent website owners somewhere? Would love to hang out there.
I've had my site (https://www.mountainwerks.org) going since 1998, and for sure, I am myself the primary user. But over time, my gosh, there is a lot of content. It started as a log of trips to the mountains. I found religion through trying to pay homage to nature by remembering each "piece" of it. Because an attitude of thankfulness gradually became nature (thanks to going out so danged much).
I wouldn't know any other way to live. Old ideas are often gold.
It's not going to be an original take if I say that I absolutely adored the early internet with the personal websites everywhere.
Comparing it with the internet of today it makes me think of the difference between a high street in a small city, full of different shops and cafes vs. a shopping mall, where everything looks the same, is loud, smelly, and obnoxious. (Of course the early internet had a lot of loud, smell, and obnoxious places, but those were much easier to avoid).
I also like the idea of people hosting their own sites. It was IMO much easier to talk about the free speech if you were hosting your own website and didn't have a "connection broker" (Twitter, Facebook) between you and your readers. The whole argument of "it's a private bussines, therefore it can just kick you out" goes out the window (unless you want to go and moles the ISP, but it's easier to argue that they are just an utility provider).
Anyone know how a way to run a personal site for around $50 USD or under a year that can be pointed to a custom domain? My wife does some rug making and wants a portfolio available to show off her art, but we would prefer not to pay $10-20/month for such a site.
If you're slightly technical that should be $1/year for hosting + $10 for domain name registration.
I don't know what the best way is now, but a few years ago I set up an s3 bucket that where I basically got charged nothing because the site was < 10mb, and I had that behind cloudflare's cdn which doesn't charge for bandwith. S3 lets you serve static files if the bucket name is the same as the domain name - so no webserver or anything needed.
I am pretty sure for a very small static site there's probably a handful of options that are basically free. One of gitpages, cloudflare pages, I think have free bandwith, not sure about vercel, or netlify.
The $50 is because I dont want to have to get a cheap vps and maintain everything. I want to be able to load up a custom theme in some CMS and give her the login credentials.
I use digital ocean, but their cost actualy rose a tad bit over the last year, and i have heard that hetzner has better pricing, though i have not yet used them. Again, just take a look at the above site, and can search for a low cost hosting provider. Others leverage github pages, etc...for free, but that seems antithetical to this greater topic of self-host your own. Good luck!
Buying an old refubished computer and running whatever web server on a small & efficient linux distro is not really cheap in the beginning (since you've got to spend a few $ to buy the computer that will be a small home server), but in the long term it's really cheap (I spent 50€ in 2017 for an old dell optiplex fx160 on ebay, and it's still running my websites today).
Check out fastmail.com ... Given an email account, hosting a new website is nearly as easy as uploading an entire directory (to file storage) in one operation, then assigning a url to it (under one of the 20-30 fastmail domains). I have not linked a custom domain to one of these, but they do IIRC support it.
I've had excellent results with pointing people to Google Sites. The editor and available features work really well for just a static site for someone non-technical. You can set it up on a free Google account and point a custom domain name to it [1] very easily.
IMO making "a new Wordpress" doesn't feel like a great alternative -- Wordpress is pretty good as it is, and you have the option of self-hosting fairly painlessly if you want to.
The fun of late-90s website-making is real though, but I don't see a turn towards that for the vast majority of people.
One nice corner of optimism is projects like Glitch [1], which give just enough space to explore, go wild, and quickly host what you make.
Yes please. With the “creator culture” from TikTok etc, I think if personal sites could be made _that_ easy and fun, they’d come back in fashion. Personally I’m ready for MySpace 2.0
> Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them.
Wow, thanks for listing me as a personal website that you love! It'll give me some motivation to write new blog posts. For anyone curious it's the aryaboudaie.com one
The law matters. Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act matters. And in the old days, for several centuries, the laws regarding libel and slander mattered, but of course at the moment they are not being aggressively pursued. Nowadays you can go on Twitter and say that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring out of a pizza restaurant in Washington DC, and Clinton is not allowed to bring a libel suit against Twitter because of Section 230, nor would it be fruitful for her to file thousands (or even millions) of suits against the anonymous people who post that particular rumor. And so, for all practical purposes, the normal laws regarding libel have been suspended. And yet people still need some way to defend their reputations against lies.
Do you want people to set up personal websites?
The answer is obvious: repeal Section 230.
Once Section 230 is gone, sites such as Twitter and Facebook will simply cease to exist. They will either shut down on their own, or they will be sued into oblivion.
Everyone would be forced to set up their own website, and then take full legal responsibility for what is posted to that website.
Once Section 230 is gone, then the normal rules of libel come back into force, as they existed for several centuries. Some extremists might regard this as censorship, but for several centuries the normal laws of libel were not regarded as censorship.
A civil society can only prevail where people are required to take full legal responsibility for the things they say in public spaces.
At the current moment, our laws regarding libel are made almost useless because the publisher of the lies are protected by Section 230, and going after each anonymous individual, when thousands or even millions of people are repeating the lie, is too burdensome for even wealthy individuals to pursue the cases. When wealthy people ask their lawyers "Can I sue?" the lawyers remind them of the Streisand effect:
I do not know what will happen in the future, but I am certain the current set of arrangements cannot survive. People must have some way of defending their reputations, and the traditional way of doing so has been through our laws regarding libel and slander.
To my mind, the most obvious way forward is to repeal Section 230. Large sites such as Twitter and Facebook would likely vanish, and people would then be forced to set up personal websites, and they would be responsible for everything said on those websites. Like newspaper publishers, they could publish many writers, if they wanted to, but they would face the normal legal burdens of libel law, just like every newspaper.
Not to be that guy, but even without Section 230 Hillary Clinton wouldn't be able to sue because she can very easily be demonstrated to be a Public Figure. This is the reason why you can go on Twitter and say pretty much anything you want about celebrities.
Also: Repeal Section 230? Yeah, that sounds like a great idea... it's a great way to ensure that the only speech that is permitted is Corporate speech, not Your speech. Thanks, but no thanks.
This would create a web enormously hostile to social interaction. No website would be able to host user-generated content. The only ways to communicate would be to read someone's website or send them an email. It's such a destructive proposal that I'm honestly kind of amazed by it.
My take: people created websites back then because there was no other choice. People RUSHED into MySpace when it got hot partly because of this.
Many people don't care about web culture; they only care about consuming. Just like many people don't become screenwriters or directors because they love TV or movies (though this is definitely a bigger pipeline than tech); they just want The Avengers or Real Housewives or whatever.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Most people have non-computery interests, and that's fine.