Comment by thinkingisfun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thinkingisfun | Hacker News Reader

I think this bit from an older article sums it up nicely:

http://www.the-haystack.com/2010/12/17/death-to-web-services...

What if we flipped this all on its head? What if we hosted our own data, and provided APIs for all these webapps so that they can use our data? I can imagine that to be a substantially cool use of RDFa/Microformats and whatever metadata/semantic web technologies you prefer. Isn’t one of the points of the semantic web to make decentralized information meaningful, retrievable and mixable?

So instead of having our own websites aggregate our own data from other people’s websites, we’ll let other people use the data from our own websites. Photos, meaningfully tagged, can be pulled in by Flickr via our own personal API, if you will. We provide the structured data, Flickr provides the functionality. The sharing. The social. Why not?

Personal publishing platforms like WordPress, Drupal, [your favorite here] could be extended to make use of microformatting, RDF, etc. and provide tools for syndication, as we now do with simple blogposts. Services don’t need to host our data. They only need to do cool things with it.

I love this. Exactly. There's no reason we can't do this other than the will to do it. The social web could be open and distributed and web-like while still looking centralized like twitter.

It seems that you are disregarding the vast majority of Facebook/Google+/whatever users -- who still don't know how to, or don't want to setup their own domain and manage blogging software. Yet, they also want to have a place to put their voice out there.

A system like the one that GP proposes, while it could be pretty awesome, would be limited to a very small, extremely homogenous population. It's not hard to see why Facebook beats that.

I would argue that it could be made possible to allow folks to get domains, hosting and software that they control as easily as buying a toy on Amazon. Domains, DNS and hosting setup doesn't need to be hard - it's hard because no one has tried to change it.

I have to disagree. Dreamhost makes it very simple to register a domain and have WP installed. Wordpress.com makes it simpler still. How much simpler does it need to be?

Everyone knows what WordPress is, I think people who entertain the idea of publishing are aware of their options now. The draw of social networks is that there is a low friction process -- facilitated by an interested party -- which makes it very easy to go from ideation to publication. Until very recent versions of WP, it was a pain in the ass (from a regular user's perspective) to simply post a set of pictures along with some thoughts.

If we look at your set of questions, something like e.g. Facebook provides answers to all of them which are, yes unsatisfying, but the trade off is a low-effort process.

EDIT: Also, out of curiosity what do you use to host your site, and how/why did you choose it?

Well, arguably it has to be as easy (and hip and fun and attractive) as signing up for Twitter.

Easier but yes.

Not really.

It's still very hard for the average person.

Weebly has actually done this already, but their main selling point is a website. The blog is just one of the components.

Here's a proposal/mockup from last year that illustrates how the setup part of the process could be made more understandable and convenient for the broader public: http://markmhendrickson.com/homesteading-on-the-indie-web

A system like the one that GP proposes, while it could be pretty awesome, would be limited to a very small, extremely homogenous population

How so?

What makes "people who don't want to set up their own domain" homogenous compared to people who want to be first-class citizens of the internet?

Especially once the desire for that is there, it won't be hard to throw money together and run small nodes. Perfect strangers share apartments with each other, we figured that out, so once we realized we really do need webspace, and that it costs money and is complicated, respective services and culture will be established within months. Actually these services already exist for the most part, they just need to get with the OStatus program, and need to be used. Then you order your webspace, 1-click-install your "web presence", done.

And why "extremely small"? We don't even KNOW how many people are running diaspora/ostatus/etc. servers, and how many in total are signed up to them. There is no way, and no need, to count it. You just do what you always do, hold on to interesting people and projects as you run into them.

I don't know about you, but the internet was pretty cool even 10 years ago. I wouldn't mind a little small brother of the "renters social net", with the DIY peeps. Those are not homogenous by any means. They already outnumber Google+ users, I'm sure :P Also, you say "whatever" users - I take it "whatever" means "anything that isn't interoperable via open standards"?

You see, those people can do whatever they want, as far as I'm concerned. Do I listen to Gangsta Rap because X people do? NO.

Same goes for facebook etc. You want to be my cyberfriend, get your sh*t together. You want to read my stuff, or want me to read yours - don't be lazy, or it probably never really mattered in the first place. I don't mind staying in touch with RL friends who are lame when it comes to computers via facebook -- but that's not at all where my attention is, when it comes to the web. I have links on my profile, Every few months I get bored and respond or comment on random things; that's it.

Again with this. There's no reason everyone has to compete with Facebook. Should pg even keep running hacker news? I mean, it's great for nerds but the vast majority of people won't ever use it.

I hate this attitude. "If my grandma isn't on the service, it can't possibly be a good idea." Suddenly everything has to be everyone-scale from day one, never mind how long it took Facebook to reach beyond college students.

With a distributed system, the masses could delegate everything to whatever large provider they like the best (FB, Google, etc), but by being distributed, they'd all get to share info instead of being in a walled garden with only other FB, G+, etc users.

So the nutty privacy freaks could happily host their own server, the drooling masses could sign up with whoever's popular that week, and everybody would still be part of one big happy family of people posting drunken party pics... :]

FB will fight such developments tooth and nail, of course...

Isn't the issue that the 'walled gardens' would need to pull the data in? - what is the benefit for them to this?

Maybe app.net will be part of the solution, but I've not seen any promise from app.net to not be acquired.

The borg eventually acquire anything good with a user base, the result is mediocrity (see DejaNews).

I don't think the other members would agree with most acquisition offers ;)

Yes. Some call it a Personal Data Service. There's community at http://pde.cc. There's the VRM crowd. There's http://eclipse.org/higgins/. There's TimBl's http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/CloudStorage.html etc...

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