I generally agree with the sentiment (and yes, internet should be treated as an utility). However, the reality is that the vast majority of people will not be able to self-host on their own hardware for a myriad of reasons (lack of skill, lack of money, lack of interest, etc.) That's not a reason to gatekeep them from having their own corner and claim it as theirs.
If you have a domain and your own site, even hosted on a colocated rack or in the cloud, you're already miles ahead of those that don't. And if you have a domain and can manage DNS records, then in the future that doesn't preclude you from "graduating" to your own hardware, if you so desire. The goal here is more or less self-sufficiency with web properties rather than a pure interpretation of "rent" vs. "own." Because at some point you have to rent something from someone (say, you're not running your own domain registry and registrar).
I don't want to gatekeep, I want to gate-unkeep! The way things are going, we're divinding the people and the companies into two classes, with the former having fewer rights and privileges than the latter.
I want everyone to have the RIGHT to participate in the Internet, should they have the interest to learn how to do it. That right is under pressure when we accept this division, when we use the excuse that "most people don't know how to", to justify taking away everyones right to even try.
If only companies have the right to participate on the internet, they are empowered even more to chose who should be allowed to even run a website.. It's a slippery slope that ends up in a very bad place, participation wise.
It becomes like the airline industry, where the companies pushing hardest for more regulation and red-tape are the oldest, those who made their fortunes back when it was easier and cheaper, and who now use their enourmous wealth to make it harder for new players to enter their market.
It's the same everywhere, when you start allowing power to concentrate.
There is a simple way though : have the ISPs provide all of this. If they can provide you a personal website, an email account and a NAS, they can also provide you a a personal website and an email account ON that NAS. (Especially now, with IPv6.)
(Which of course assumes that there are laws in place against lock-in, just like there are already laws in place against lock-in for your pick of ISPs and obligations for mobile carriers to transfer your phone number to another carrier.)
I think this only shifts the problem, the whole idea with the internet is a distributed network of computers that talk with each other, and if the computers at the edge (end users) can't do that, then it's no longer the internet, it's something else, more akin to cable-tv where there are "providers" and "consumers". The playing field stops being level.
Ah, I took it as you suggesting the ISPs providing VPS services for people..
Thing is, that edge infrastructure has been there from the beginning of broadband and is only recently beginning to slip away, with the advent of ISP NAT, agressive IP rotations, blocking of ports and not providing public IPs at all.
Yeah, I am still thinking how to evolve this into a useful, yet minimalist design as it grows. I am quite inspired by high-density websites (things that were de-facto in the late 90s), so will have to see how to incorporate that.
That being said, the meta-point about at-scale discovery is astute - it's largely unsolved for personal sites/digital gardens. And I certainly don't want to be the bottleneck long-term. Will have to think through a solution as more content gets added.
The beauty of this site is that it's just HTML with minimal styling and JavaScript. If the current walled garden doesn't fit my needs at some point in the future, throwing it on another host takes less than 10 minutes, plus whatever the delay will be from DNS propagation. That's a built-in future resiliency, IMO.
I think it right to base the assessment of whether it is a walled garden on how easy it is for outsiders to access, and how easy it is to leave and take your community.
For viewing, I think you are doing well - your own domain name, which you can host where you like, and which currently doesn't impose many restrictions on who can view without signing up to anything.
But part of your community engagement is about having the community submit changes to you. And having that via GitHub is a walled garden - you can't make a PR without a GitHub account - or even search the code. And they say you are only allowed one free account - so one identity only - and I've heard credible reports they actively enforce it by IP matching etc..., and ban people if they suspect them of having two accounts.
Moving off GitHub isn't always that easy - you'd need to retrieve all your PRs, but then the problem is people who have GitHub accounts to engage with you would need to migrate their method of engagement.
So GitHub is absolutely a walled garden, and if you have a public GitHub, it is part of how you engage with your community.
Walled gardens do have the benefit of more people being in them - there is some barrier to entry to signing up on a random Gitea or Forgejo instance - but then you are beholden to the policies of the walled garden.
Fair point - I will add a note to the top that if you don't want to contribute via GitHub, you can send me a note to hi@den.dev. I will make the change myself.
i do miss these sites. A bit nostalgic to them times where visiting a site had the information you are looking for and only the information you're looking for
Look at the front page of HN - see my project randomly. Thank you for sharing! The goal with this site is precisely that, share people's digital gardens.
If your site is self-hosted (that is, not on medium.com or Substack or the likes, or if it is - has a custom domain), I'd be happy to add it. My goal for this year is to massively grow the list.
Does it have to be self-hosted? My sites, for example, are generally hosted on one of the various VPS services, some big and well known like Linode, others smaller like 1984.hosting. I move around too much to be worried about setting up servers in my homes, etc, but fully support the smolweb movement and love making my own tiny html places.
Not the OP but I think hosting on a VPS is valid. "Self-admin" may be a better term, I don't know. You are still "indie" and not bound to any corporate culture.
You are in full control down to the OS but not the hardware so yeah it counts.
I once questioned if hosting on VPS was covered under the term self-hosting and got down voted. It was a legit question, as is your question, but I guess people took it as if I was saying that it isn't self-hosting.
It offers significantly more flexibility and freedom compared to any social network. If your data is "hijacked" (not sure that that means in this context, but let's assume the host terminated your account), you can spin up another hosting account on one of the many hosting providers and point your domain to it. That's it (not to say that it's that trivial for large sites, but that's the gist of it).
If your account on a major social network is terminated, if you had a large community there, you have quite literally no way to access them unless you had some kind of parallel presence somewhere else.
In the grand scheme of things and at this point, it probably doesn't matter. I know for me it certainly is not in any shape a discouragement to continue writing on my blog and contributing code to open source communities (my own and others).
But if we're going to dig into this a bit, one person reading my code, internalizing it, processing it themselves, tweaking it and experimenting with it, and then shipping something transformative means that I've enhanced the knowledge of some individual with my work. It's a win. They got my content for free, as I intended it to be, and their life got a tiny bit better because of it (I hope).
The opposite of that is some massively funded company taking my content, training a model off of it, and then reaping profits while the authors don't even get as much as an acknowledgement. You could theoretically argue that in the long-run, a LLM would likely help other people through my content that it trained on, but ethically this is most definitely a more-than-gray area.
The (good/bad) news is that this ship has sailed and we now need to adjust to this new mode of operation.
> The opposite of that is some massively funded company taking my content, training a model off of it, and then reaping profits while the authors don't even get as much as an acknowledgement.
Taking out the "training a model" part, the same thing could happen with a human at the company.
Oh, 100%. I mentioned this in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42582518) - I've dealt with a fair share of stolen content (thankfully nothing too important, just a random blog post here and there), and it definitely stings. The difference is that this is now done at a massive scale.
But again - this doesn't stop me from continuing to write and publish in the open. I am writing for other people reading my content, and as a bouncing board for myself. There will always be some shape or form of actors that try to piggyback off of that effort, but that's the trade-off of the open web. I am certainly not planning to lock all my writing behind a paywall to stop that.
Also, big fan of Krtek - grew up on that cartoon, was quite an educational experience at that age.