[HN Gopher] Always Own Your Platform (2019)
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Always Own Your Platform (2019)
Author : ddtaylor
Score : 83 points
Date : 2022-06-09 20:45 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.alwaysownyourplatform.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.alwaysownyourplatform.com)
| bumper_crop wrote:
| From 2006 to 2014 I owned my own platform. Several actually. But
| I turned them down after it became a lot of work to maintain. At
| the time, it wasn't so obvious the web was dying, but in
| hindsight I probably helped kill it.
|
| In the beginning the web was so new, and growing so fast, with
| new things, amazing sites, and more people getting online. Like
| all things in life, competition arises, and better sites started
| getting much more of the market share. People's expectations for
| what a website could offer rose tremendously, and would abandon a
| site if it wasn't up to snuff. Sites needed to have ever
| improving visuals, better content, better people, better
| interactivity, better everything.
|
| And I couldn't keep up with it. Users went from being happy to
| try out something new to dismissive and bitter. More and more it
| felt like work to try to make them happy, to keep building more
| and better things. And that's exactly what happened. The Internet
| became work. It's why we all have to be paid to come to work and
| build the Internet. No one does it for free, because it's a
| thankless grueling job. The only websites that survived were the
| ones that made money, and could afford to use that money to hire
| people. Google, Facebook, Myspace, Stumbleupon, 9gag, and even
| Something Awful became money oriented rather than community
| oriented. They had to, or else.
|
| The advice to "Always Own Your Own Platform" is a euphemistic way
| of saying make a whole company out of your site and underpay the
| only employee (you) for ever. The reason we don't own our own
| platform anymore is because it's soooo annoying to do so. It
| wasn't an accident.
| hsn915 wrote:
| As others have pointed out, there's currently no solution that
| allows common people to self host.
|
| There's a minimum level of linux/sysadmin/devops expertise
| requried to setup and maintain a self hosted website.
|
| I've written a somewhat long essay about this problem:
|
| https://hasen.substack.com/simple-self-hosting
|
| A solution is possible but no one is working on it yet as far as
| I can tell.
|
| Instead, everyone wants to make money by taking offline/local
| applications and turning them into online/cloud applications
| (even if no specific capability is gained by being on the cloud)
| just because it's easier to make more money that way.
| mojuba wrote:
| So, the eternal "You can host your stuff in your basement" vs.
| "No, not everyone can host their stuff, it's hard".
|
| Here's (hopefully) some food for thought on how a decentralized
| web could work in an ideal world in the future.
|
| The problem is, even if you sell amazing shiny turn-key server
| boxes to every household, where they would be able to seamlessly
| host everything they currently keep elsewhere (iCloud, Facebook,
| etc.); even if messaging and other communication becomes absolute
| P2P in the whole world and therefore there's no need for
| centralized messaging services --
|
| -- there would still be the problem of centralized search. The
| beauty of Internet is not in its content as much as in the
| ability to discover it. Search implies there has to be a central
| place where you start it. This is why everyone - techies or not -
| tend to push their creations to places that provide exposure and
| discoverability: Medium, SoundCloud, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Then
| all that is additionally indexed by a meta-engine that is Google
| today. Centralization upon centralization.
|
| I think there might be a solution to this which would be a mix of
| P2P and locally centralized services. Imagine a gigantic balanced
| tree of indexing engines that belong, say, to communities.
| Whenever someone performs a search anywhere in the world, the
| query is propagated through the tree and is processed in a
| parallel manner by a great many nodes at once. I'm not sure about
| the exact algorithm right now, but something suggests Google
| probably works this way anyway. Except in this ideal world, the
| search engine doesn't belong to a single authority, but is rather
| split into myriads of local services maintained by (and paid for)
| by the communities or some small local companies.
|
| If you think it would be wasteful and traffic-heavy, think of the
| resources and bandwidth that might be freed if Google, Facebook
| and other giants were replaced by this highly decentralized
| system, which, again, would work pretty much like the incumbents
| do, except data would belong to and hosted by individuals who
| created it, and search would be one giant brain with potentially
| millions of cells that perform queries in parallel.
|
| How far fetched is this? Very :) But at least I hope the idea is
| thought provoking.
| Jistern wrote:
| Clickbaity and unnecessary.
|
| All that needed to be said to the Hacker News audience was
| something like, "Remember that 'seek to avoid a single point of
| failure' applies to being enticed into vendor lock-in when, for
| example, working with a company such as Amazon, Microsoft, or
| Google."
| mawise wrote:
| Haven[1] is your own platform for publishing privately when
| you're not trying to "build an audience"
|
| [1]: https://havenweb.org
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| What's always blown my mind is the trend for businesses to fail
| to understand this. Building your entire company around AWS means
| a future competitor also already has full control of your company
| and access to your data.
|
| And I think the most hilarious example is Microsoft, a trillion-
| dollar level company which chose to hand over the entirety of the
| web (by switching to Chromium) and mobile (by abandoning WinMo
| for Android) and doesn't understand how they handed control of
| their entire business to their top competitor.
|
| The architects of those two decisions probably guaranteed the
| future collapse of Microsoft.
| wolpoli wrote:
| Microsoft tried to continue to maintain their own browser for
| years without any market share to show for it. For whatever
| reason, the browser just couldn't match the level of polish in
| Google Chrome or Apple Safari.
|
| This current situation is stable for Microsoft - the fact that
| Microsoft is gaining market share with Edge means that
| Microsoft could threaten to fork Chromium, thus keeping Google
| in check there.
|
| ...as for mobile. I agree and wish Microsoft good luck.
| benoliver999 wrote:
| Really hard for non-techies; even a hosted WordPress isn't easy
| to use. I've been asked a few times 'I want to write online, what
| do I do?' and it's hard to find easy to use answers that don't
| involve vendor lock-in. Or me having to provide support forever.
|
| SSGs with plain text files are brilliant once you are set up, but
| it's a big hurdle getting there.
|
| Best I can do is try to find platforms with sane exit strategies.
| azangru wrote:
| > Really hard for non-techies
|
| Yes; but it's not like even that many techies host their own
| content.
|
| I love how Jeremy Keith copies everything he tweets to his own
| site [0]. Wanted to check how he set it all up; but his site
| isn't open-sourced.
|
| [0] - https://adactio.com
| al_borland wrote:
| Looks like it's the other way around. He posts on his site
| and it syndicates to the other platforms.
|
| https://youtu.be/X3SrZuH00GQ?t=852
| azangru wrote:
| Even better! The true POSSE spirit!
| 3np wrote:
| May be worth considering: Lightweight ActivityPub writing
| platform, straightforward to self-host but there are also
| managed hosts: https://writefreely.org/
| altdataseller wrote:
| Sounds cool in theory but almost impossible and impractical. For
| example, you can have a newsletter but google could decide your
| domain belongs in Spam forever. There goes that "owned platform"
| convolvatron wrote:
| I don't think there is any fix for that except for people to
| deliberatively and incrementally take that power from their
| hands. not betting on the outcome. I guess the old real hope is
| that 15 years from now when google is finally no longer
| relevant, that smaller business and individuals diffuse that
| control more broadly.
|
| or we get google 2.0
| c2h5oh wrote:
| Well, technically it's still an owned platform, just in this
| context it's a platform that got owned by google.
| azangru wrote:
| > Facebook, Google, Twitter, Medium, and YouTube entice us to
| give them our creative work. It's time to take it back ... Stop
| giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it
| yourself.
|
| So, youtube, right? Where would you host your videos if you had a
| mind to take them back?
| hammock wrote:
| YouTube can be used as a host yet not as a platform. Make all
| your videos unlisted and just use video player on your website.
| azangru wrote:
| But that's not owning your platform. What if youtube decides
| that your video is in violation of some community guidelines
| and deletes it?
| dibujante wrote:
| I would simply spend millions of dollars serving my own viral
| videos.
| bin_bash wrote:
| paid for with what, patreon?
| getcrunk wrote:
| Well. I'd wager you can server your 1 viral video for max a
| few grand a month.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| Paid for by all the Google ads you run or money from
| Patreon haha
| aqme28 wrote:
| > Google
|
| Yeah, stop letting Google dictate your search results! Create
| your own search engine and own your platform!
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Peertube for one.
|
| Even if you want to use Youtube, Floatplane or others to expose
| your content you can still pull users back to your site and own
| the creator - user relationship.
| jlbbellefeuille wrote:
| The reason why you should own your own platform is called
| "platform risk".
|
| https://www.startupillustrated.com/Archive/Platform-Risk/
| digitallyfree wrote:
| In a perfect world, everyone would have their own servers in
| their homes or colos. Fiber would be cheaply avaliable
| everywhere, and everyone would have the know-how to manage their
| locally hosted services.
|
| In truth, it's quite a lot of work to manage and maintain. Now
| there are say Docker Wordpress images that can be set up in ten
| minutes on AWS. However part of self-hosting is that there's no
| technical support - you're on your own if something breaks, there
| are updates, etc. Whereas a managed service abstracts all that
| away, and thus is appealing to a mainstream audience. While we at
| HN may like the technical side of things, many creators are
| uninterested in spending hours debugging a performance issue and
| want to write/draw/etc.
|
| Personally I have servers in my basement and run a Matrix
| instance, OpenVPN, and a webserver (static site fronted by
| Cloudflare) as my publicly exposed services. I also have
| additional services like Landscape and network storage on LAN.
| When you run all those services, you don't just follow a guide,
| set it up, and leave it. While that may work for a couple months,
| something will break eventually and you'll have to scramble to
| fix it without understanding why. To do things properly and get
| good uptime you need to understand how things work, why they're
| configured that way, and have good backup and recovery practices.
| Security is also another factor, especially if you are storing
| private or confidential information.
|
| Email is something I've considered, with a smarthost as that's
| unfortunately the only solution to get around the blacklists.
| That's on my list and getting the same kind of reliablility as a
| commercial platform is not trivial (I don't want anything
| important to bounce).
|
| Also for creators, there are services like Youtube and Twitch
| which are pretty much impossible to replicate without massive
| cost and infrastructure. If you're just doing text and images,
| then you could use a VPS or a CDN fronted homeserver and operate
| your own website. I'm not a vtuber, but if I was it simply
| wouldn't be possible for me to run my own service even though I'm
| interested in this stuff.
|
| The only thing I really can recommend is to keep local copies of
| all your work on disk, properly backed up. Then at least if you
| lose access to the service, you can bootstrap again somewhere
| else.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I think users appreciate having a feed that combines everyone's
| posts and algorithmically recommends the best ones, like
| youtube or twitter do. That can be solved with RSS now, but RSS
| doesn't get you likes and replies etc.
|
| And they appreciate having usernames so they can say "check me
| out at @username". You can solve _that_ by making everyone buy
| a domain name, but we have zero infrastructure right now for
| letting people use their domain name as their username.
|
| The cryptocurrency community does seem at least halfway
| interested in solving these problems fwiw, but they do still
| have some major scaling problems to overcome.
| heywoodlh wrote:
| > Distribute [your content] via methods you control.
|
| I'm being nitpicky but it feels off to me to call people out on
| owning their own platform but then use Cloudflare's CDN instead
| of running their own. And if they did run their own CDN, they
| would probably have to use AWS or another worldwide cloud
| provider and not own the hardware. And if I were Richard Stallman
| I would probably come down on you for using proprietary chipsets
| in your hardware instead of totally open source hardware. And you
| can just keep going deeper and deeper with this train of thought.
| So what level of ownership is acceptable to this website's
| author? I feel like the right balance of "ownership" is super
| subjective.
|
| I love a lot of traits of the "old-school" web and am a huge
| believer in self-hosting as much as possible. But imo yelling at
| people while on your high horse doesn't encourage anyone.
| rapind wrote:
| Just like security, you settle for the risk you can afford and
| are comfortable with.
|
| The cloud muddies your grasp of the risks though. A lot of
| these cloud offerings (like k8s) are incredibly complex, and
| therefore have a lot of attack vectors, and a lot of points of
| failure. We depend on layers built on layers, built on layers.
| You can't really eliminate all of these dependencies, but you
| can eliminate / reduce some of the highest risk ones (topmost
| layers).
| neoromantique wrote:
| Having CF handle your CDN proxying is still much better than
| just using some all in one platform. At least you own your data
| and can migrate it if need be.
| mro_name wrote:
| http://IndieWeb.org/POSSE to a rescue.
| dijit wrote:
| Previous (2019): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20145704
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The issue is that you will always need some type of
| infrastructure to work.
|
| Maybe we need government investment in infrastructure. Having
| government infrastructure allows a lot of small businesses to
| work.
|
| Take for example the road system. There are so many business that
| depend on the roads. Imagine if they were all owned by private
| companies that could kick you off at their whim?
|
| The postal system also is very similar, though recently it has
| been getting less investment.
|
| One advantage of government infrastructure is that there are laws
| and rights such as due process/freedom of speech/etc.
|
| I am not sure what that would look like in practice for the
| digital world. One area that be useful is digital identity. Other
| people have mentioned it, but maybe having the Postal Service
| provide you with a secure identity card (similar to what Estonia
| provides). This would enable "social login" without being
| dependent on Google/Facebook/Apple/etc.
|
| The truth is owning your own platform is beyond what an
| individual developer or small (or even medium sized) company can
| do.
| foxhop wrote:
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(page generated 2022-06-09 23:00 UTC)