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Comment by torgian | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure if I’m 100% sold on this. The service sounds like ( in their own terms ) “Big WEB” but the in a server that is... “owned”? By the user renting that server.

Honestly it just sounds like every other server farm out there. Rent a server, put your data on it, hope the service doesn’t go down and trust that the company isn’t selling your data behind your back.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea they propose. But mechanically, it seems to work like any other place.

Want to convince me? Make a service where I can rent my own server ( not just a portion of it ) and physically own it. Nobody, not even the provider, can access it without my explicit permission in written form ( email with digital signatures ).

Until then, this “Small Web” service just sounds like every other server provider out there.

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I think it’s simpler. This smells like a load of marketing to justify the existence of another silo which is controlled by some form of vanity ideology.

Nope.

We still have plenty of choices which don’t need an ideology shipped with it. I’m good with a text editor, an open source OS and a VPS, colo or some hooky box under my desk hanging off my ADSL line. That’s the small web that isn’t consumed by some portalisation which is really the issue isn’t it which is not being solved here by trying to create another one?

Agreed, my 'Small Web' is a couple of Raspberry Pi plugged in to my router exposing services that are useful to me - the more I use it and the more tech news I read, the more I want to expand both the robustness and diversity of my personal services.

Have you written about that somewhere? What kinds of services do you run yourself?

I'm afraid not - it's nothing particularly exotic, mostly Home Assistant, Pi Hole and Bitwarden password manager.

Next thing I want to add is a bookmark manager - then perhaps some kind of storage solution.

I didn't get to that point in the article, but seriously for all the paragraphs I read I thought they were just making software that I could run in my old laptop at home acting as a web-server, or a Peer-to-Peer browser-based thingy. /sighs. Well not the first time I read a cleverly disguised infomercial that eats its tail.

On a more positive note, running stuffs in my old laptop at home has proven a great way to keep connected with friends without the surveillance. But I don't see a neat way to pack the technical knowledge I used for that for people without technical knowledge... if you don't update your own setup, you have either to have a friend or friendly technician who does it, or trust Corp to push updates remotely to your home-whatever, which is just as bad as using Corp servers directly. I think that the only way out of the conundrum is technical literacy for everybody.

Have you heard of FreedomBox? I’d like to start experimenting with it sometime since I’m only semi-technical.

Also there’s a cool project called CoBox [cobox.cloud] which I found recently, which is creating open source distributed software for a cooperatively run Dropbox alternative - you can effectively build a completely self-sovereign distributed network with friends (or with yourself).

I don't get it, isn't it already easy to run your own server in a closet at home? You need a static IP (which is still very common, and getting easier with IPv6) and a linux box that is always plugged in.

It's less convenient that renting a VM or VPS somewhere and that is again less convenient than a fully managed web presence, but you can do it.

Aral is trying to make this process easier [0]

[0] https://sitejs.org/

> Make a service where I can rent my own server ( not just a portion of it ) and physically own it.

So, a dedicated server? Of course, you still have to trust the provider not to access it, but the only time I know they've accessed it is when I scheduled a replacement for a faulty hard drive. I was able to schedule that access for my convenience (so that I could rebuild RAID after replacement) and they had my permission to do so.

I don't see how this is opposed to their project, though I don't fully understand the difference between running Site.js + Hugo versus just Hugo.

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