I remember a web when practically every ISP allowed you to have a "home page" hosted with them. Your home page was situated in the "public_html" directory of your home directory on their server — hence the name.
Then the URL was http://www.<hostname.domain>/~<username>
I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time.
Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?
I actually haven't had a homepage for a long time because of the lack of the easy "put my home directory on the web", but I'd like to go back now to doing that.
Think it had more to do with the consolidation of the ISP space.
I used to have my choice of dozens of ISP's. Now if I am lucky I might have 2 or 3 from very large companies that did the math on keeping that going. It mostly happened when ADSL and cable took over. In most areas that meant only 2 or 3 companies could actually provide anything at speeds their customers wanted. Think at the time they always said it was cost cutting.
I think the point the author is trying to make is more so about these mini networks on their own LAN, which their family uses. (And maybe dreaming of a neighbourhood utility LAN as a middle ground between LAN in your house and WAN as just a trunk to a big ISP node) The full quote is
- A Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a 3 gigabyte hard drive setup as a "server" (makes this site available on my home network[9])
- I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access (I have the least expensive subscription for this)
...
[9] I can view my personal web on my home network from my phone, tablet and computers. So can the rest of my family.
As the author of a content management system I made with the idea to democratize internet content creation, I've had a lot of the same thoughts that the author brings up here. I've always thought that even learning Markdown was a bridge to far when it comes to empowering non-technical users however. In my experience it's best just to supply tooling similar to Word where you have buttons for things like lists and bolding. Using Markdown as the format itself is something I will agree with though.
Another thought I had is that local AI could most definitely play a part in helping non-technical users create the kind of content they want. If your CMS gives you a GPT-like chat window that allows a non-technical user to restyle the page as they like, or do things like make mass edits - then I think that is something that could help some of the issues mentioned here.
It's definitely an approach. I do think in true democratization of the internet, teaching people some tech is inevitable. We just can't have equal access if we retain the classes of user and maker as completely distinct.
They totally suck like tiny homes?
No, actually they are better than tiny homes.
Browser are the #1 reason why you want a computer that's better than a Pi 500. Wanting to play modern games is #2.
The irony of this being fully hosted on GitHub should not be lost. A toaster is sufficient to host a mostly static site, a VPS would be far more than sufficient.
Owning things isn't free (and a VPS isn't owning things, either)
I absolutely agree with the concept, but people have to be ready to do their own work rather than delegating it to other parties. Consolidation has happened because these massive conglomerates absorb operational complexity on the cheap, and that's attractive. Moving away from them means we take on the responsibility of doing it ourselves.
You know what they say about the kind of services FAANG gives away for free...
And yes, I get the practicality of it. However, when people are actually doing shit like this[1] in the real world, writers of manifestos might consider practicing what they preach a tad more.
Well, you pay for it at least, and hence enter into a contract with the service provider. A free GitHub account is a come-on by Microsoft to enmesh you further in the world of hosted services - the precise thing this manifesto is complaining about
I really do agree with the sentiment of this guy. I am this guy mentally but what he is saying is so painfully out of touch and completely ignores how people actually use the web today. My bro the web isnt controlled by corps because its to hard to host a web page. Corps have created these extremely far reaching and complex applications and people prefer to use those than browser through statically generated pages. Average man doesnt want to come home and update his page he just wants to open the app on his phone, scroll for a bit and close it.
The problem is in the environment but also the user behavior. Unless you can provide a convincing argument to change both by presenting an actual improvement then its farting in the wind
The challenge I've always felt, is shared services -- if I'm running infra myself, I can depend upon it, but if someone else is running it, I'm never really sure if I can, which makes external services really hard to rely on and invest into.
Maybe you can get further than expected with individual services? But shared services at some point seem really useful.
I think web2 solved that in an unfortunate way, where you know the corporations operating the services / networks are aligned in some ways but not in others.
But would be great to have shared services that do have better guarantees. Disclaimer, we're working on something in that direction, but really curious what others have seen or thinking in this area.
The real barrier was never technical. It was convenience and discovery. Running a Pi at home is trivial for anyone on HN, but the moment you want people to actually find your stuff, you need DNS, a stable IP, and some way to not get buried under the noise.
Tailscale and similar overlay networks have made the "accessible from anywhere" part way easier than it used to be. The missing piece is still discovery. RSS was the closest we got to decentralized discovery, and we collectively let it rot. Maybe it's time to bring it back properly.
I think the key issue here is that Attention is a temporal construct, meaning discovery is often tied to "being the first thing that comes to people's minds" which means SEO, reverse engineering the ranking algorithms, and constantly having to manage an "online persona". Note none of those things contribute to the actual work you're doing, just your "marketing department" (and whatever time/financial "budget" you intend to give it).
MrBeast figured out the YouTube algorithm - post early and often. Is that how we exist on modern Internet when every website/thumbnail is engineered by a team to maximize clickthrough rates? I agree RSS is useful, but it faces the same scalability issues if everyone starts filling up your RSS feeds. Given the limited amount of time you can devote to a particular task, we'll return to the era of A/B testing Headlines.
This guy has been around long enough to know about NNTP, which is the original distributed people-focused web, but talks about how HTML is some kind of barrier to entry.
I kind of resonate with a lot of things in the article. My own personal view is that we should make hosting stuff vastly simpler; that's one of the goals of my project, at least my attempt (self promo)
Thanks cap'n-py. Yeah, I love Sandstorm. My goal is to be more portable, lighter, and a 'download binary and run' kind of tool. There are also other attempts around what I call the 'packaging with Docker' approach (Coolify, etc.), which are more attempts at packaging existing apps. But my approach—the platform—gives a bunch of stuff you can use to make apps faster, but you have to bend to its idiosyncrasies. In turn, you do not need a beefy home lab to run it (not everyone is a tinkerer). It's more focused, so it will be easier for the end user running it than for the developer.
I agree with the point that big companies have persuaded people that only they can offer ease of publishing content. most of my friends publish on Facebook, X, Instagram etc.
I have tried to get them to publish markdown sites using GitHub pages, but the pain of having to git commit and do it via desktop was the blocker.
So I recently made them a mobile app called JekyllPress [0] with which they can publish their posts similar to WordPress mobile app. And now a bunch of them regularly publish on GitHub pages. I think with more tools to simplify the publishing process, more people will start using GitHub pages (my app still requires some painful onboarding like creating a repo, enabling GitHub pages and getting PAT, no oAuth as I don't have any server).
But it is portable. It is essentially markdown files. You can download your repo, compile the Jekyll to static pages and publish them anywhere.
When you publish to Facebook, WordPress etc you can't easily get your stuff out. You will have to process them even if they allow you to download your content as a zip folder. The images will be broken. Links between pages won't work etc.
Facebook provides a data export service which gives you a zip file with a web version of all your content. I’m not sure what the difference is then between that and a Github hosted repository of all your content as a webpage.
We got here iteratively..not all at once. So the path back...it's iterative. I shouldn't even say back. We're not going back. We have to go in a new direction. And again it's evolutionary. So ultimately a lot of these big systems and big tech companies aren't going anywhere and they will be integral to all infrastructure for the foreseeable future whether that be technical, financial or related to public services. But as individuals we can slowly shift some of our efforts elsewhere in ways that it might matter.
Here's my small contribution to that. https://github.com/micro/mu - an app platform without ads, algorithms or tracking.
Unfortunately the transparency of the IP stack means that unless u want whole world to know where u live via one DNS query, you'd need to use a service to proxy back to urself. And if ur paying for remote compute anyways, you could probably just host ur stuff there. Any machine that can proxy traffic back to you is just as capable of hosting ur static stuff there.
The only way we own a web of our own is to develop much more of a culture of leaving smallish machines online all the time. Imagine something like Tor or BitTorrent, but everyone has a very simple way of running their own node for content hosting.
That always-on device? To get critical mass, instead of just the nerds, you'd need it to ship with devices which are always-on, like routers/gateways, smart TV's. Then you're back to being at the mercy of centralized companies who also don't love patching their security vulnerabilities.
(1) Security. An always-on, externally accessible device will always be a target for breaking in. You want the device to be bulletproof, and to have defense in depth, so that breaking into one service does not affect anything else. Something like Proxmox that works on low-end hardware and is as easy to administer as a mobile phone would do. We are somehow far from this yet. A very limited thing like a static site may be made both easy and bulletproof though.
(2) Connectivity providers should allow that. Most home routers don't get a static IP, or even a globally routable IPv4 at all. Or even a stable IPv6. This complicates the DNS setup, and without DNS such resources are basically invisible.
From the pure resilience POV, it seems more important to keep control of your domain, and have an automated way to deploy your site / app on whatever new host, which is regularly tested. Then use free or cheap DNS and VM hosting of convenience. It takes some technical chops, but can likely be simplified and made relatively error-proof with a concerted effort.
Both or those are solved by having a tunnel and a cache that is hosted in the cloud. Something like tailscale or cloudflare provides this pretty much out of the box, but wireguard + nginx on a cheap VPS would accomplish much the same if you are serious about avoiding the big guys.
If I'm reading the implication right, you're having a pretty terrible idea. Glossing over what running a server would do to your battery, it would never work because of the routing issues you'll run into.
With IPv6 it would theoretically be possible, but currently with ipv4 and NATs everywhere, your website would almost never be reachable, even with fancy workarounds like dynDNS
I think the main issue with federated apps is the identity and moderation. Without identity verification is hard to moderate so you end up with closed systems where some big CO does the moderation at an acceptable level
The current wave of AI agents is diminishing the value of identity as a DDOS or content-moderation signal. The formula until now included bot = bad, but unless your service wants to exclude everyone using OpenClaw and friends, that's no longer a valid heuristic.
If identity is no longer a strong signal, then the internet must move away from CAPTCHAs and logins and reputation, and focus more on the proposed content or action instead. Which might not be so bad. After all, if I read a thought-provoking, original, enriching comment on HN, do I really care if it was actually written by a dog?
One more half thought: what if the solution to the Sybil problem is deciding that it's not a problem? Go ahead and spin up your bot network, join the party. If we can design systems that assign zero value to uniqueness and require originality or creativity for a contribution to matter, then successful Sybil "attacks" are no longer attacks, but free work donated by the attacker.
> if I read a thought-provoking, original, enriching comment on HN, do I really care if it was actually written by a dog?
I would rather just read the thought as it was originally expressed by a human somewhere in the AI's training data, rather than a version of it that's been laundered through AI and deployed according to the separate, hidden intent of the AI's operator.
It's not about ease of publishing. The issue is what people get in return for publishing. Until you can design a platform that gives top creators as much money+attention as commercial platforms, you'll see a drain of top creators and their viewers to commercial platforms.
100%. You don't even need to give people money. It's about attention and feedback.
People post photos on Instagram and status updates on Facebook because their friends will see it there and give it a thumbs up.
A couple of decades ago, I spent a lot of time laboriously building a website for scratch for my photography. It was objectively a really nice site. I had my own domain, hosted it on a VPS, and put a ton of work into the layout and design.
But none of my friends ever thought to go there. I could see by my web stats that every now and then a random stranger would find the site... but they had no easy way of connecting with me and acknowledging that they saw it. If they put a lot of effort in, they could find my email address and email, but that's a hell of a lot harder than just clicking a little thumbs up button next to a Facebook post or filling a comment in the comment box.
Uploading photos to my site was about as rewarding as printing them out and throwing them in the trash. I thought about adding support for that to my site, but then it opens the whole can of worms around user-generated content, abuse, moderation, etc.
Eventually, I moved to Flickr, which at the time was an actual community that gave me that connection. Then Flickr fizzled out. Now, on the rare times I bother to process a photo... I just upload it to Facebook because that's where (a dwindling subset of) my friends are.
It's not about the content. It's about the human connection. A CMS won't fix that.
Very much enjoyed this. Always am shocked that my colleagues on the humanistic/writing studies side don't have a larger contingent actively contributing to web and publication technologies/specs, ceding so much of that space to folks with design backgrounds; they still don't really invest enough time into understanding networked writing
I think this mostly misses the biggest reason why writers would choose big tech platforms or other big platforms: discovery and aggregation. If you want to speak to be heard and not just for its own sake, then you want to go where the people are hanging out and where they could actually find your content.
This is like talking about how book authors don't need Amazon when you have a printer and glue at home.
It’s not really covered, but p2p technology combined with every phone in the world (and a little wishful thinking) could make for some neat applications.
Co-ownership of the hardware is a social not technical problem. Think of questions of trust, responsibility, who has power, who and how contributes, how decisions are made, etc, etc
I mean, you do have a point, and I'll quite agree with it. The only way of monetizing your writing is to use Substack or Medium, or whatever.
Yet your approach is appallingly low on the other side of the spectrum. I've been in IT for the past 25 years. I have yet to see a non-IT person who knows what dedicated IP is. If you are not publishing it on the internet, then what's the point?
I've seen plenty of companies where the owner just had a read-only shared drive, where people can rummage thru a pack of PDFs. This' was all fine with that.
You have to understand, manage and work with the complexities of the tools, and offer tools quite enough for the task. It's alright to offer what you do to an engineer who has a spare Pi and a couple of days to kill. But it's quite useless for anyone else to adopt.
I agree with owning the network devices, and lack of control here is a problem that still has solutions.
And self-hosting personal services makes sense and we're able to do that.
BUT, we don't own the connections. There's always going to be shared infrastructure for connecting these devices worldwide, and without an ideal state of Communism or utopian capitalism we're not going to own them or want to be responsible for them. Any kind of service that depends on a central database is not going to be communally owned.
Ownership is an economic problem, the technical aspect is merely interesting. Bitcoin might be a great example of this.
> Simple to use software that empowers us to both read and write hypertext4 and syndicated content
Simple to use software... this would be grand!
> Raspberry Pi OS (a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU Linux)
Is this simple? I would contend that it is not. Why do I tell people "buy apple products" as a matter of course? Because they have decent security, great ease of use, and support is an Apple Store away.
They still manage to screw things up.
Look at the emergence of docker as an install method for software on linux. We sing the praises of this as means of software distribution and installation... and yet it's functionally un-usable by normal (read: non technical) people.
I personally think the trend we witnessed with clawdbot where people ran to buy mac minis or other ways of self hosting ai agents is going to be a huge wind in the sails for generally hosting things at home.
Then the URL was http://www.<hostname.domain>/~<username>
I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time.
Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~btitzer/riff.html
I actually haven't had a homepage for a long time because of the lack of the easy "put my home directory on the web", but I'd like to go back now to doing that.
I used to have my choice of dozens of ISP's. Now if I am lucky I might have 2 or 3 from very large companies that did the math on keeping that going. It mostly happened when ADSL and cable took over. In most areas that meant only 2 or 3 companies could actually provide anything at speeds their customers wanted. Think at the time they always said it was cost cutting.
A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing online...
Hosting on GitHub is merely a convenience; they can up and leave anytime.
Another thought I had is that local AI could most definitely play a part in helping non-technical users create the kind of content they want. If your CMS gives you a GPT-like chat window that allows a non-technical user to restyle the page as they like, or do things like make mass edits - then I think that is something that could help some of the issues mentioned here.
just fyi, Word still has Save As -> Web Page (.htm). For a blog post or newsletter type thing i bet it works just fine.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage
They totally suck like tiny homes? No, actually they are better than tiny homes. Browser are the #1 reason why you want a computer that's better than a Pi 500. Wanting to play modern games is #2.
I absolutely agree with the concept, but people have to be ready to do their own work rather than delegating it to other parties. Consolidation has happened because these massive conglomerates absorb operational complexity on the cheap, and that's attractive. Moving away from them means we take on the responsibility of doing it ourselves.
And yes, I get the practicality of it. However, when people are actually doing shit like this[1] in the real world, writers of manifestos might consider practicing what they preach a tad more.
[1]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com
The problem is in the environment but also the user behavior. Unless you can provide a convincing argument to change both by presenting an actual improvement then its farting in the wind
The challenge I've always felt, is shared services -- if I'm running infra myself, I can depend upon it, but if someone else is running it, I'm never really sure if I can, which makes external services really hard to rely on and invest into.
Maybe you can get further than expected with individual services? But shared services at some point seem really useful.
I think web2 solved that in an unfortunate way, where you know the corporations operating the services / networks are aligned in some ways but not in others.
But would be great to have shared services that do have better guarantees. Disclaimer, we're working on something in that direction, but really curious what others have seen or thinking in this area.
Tailscale and similar overlay networks have made the "accessible from anywhere" part way easier than it used to be. The missing piece is still discovery. RSS was the closest we got to decentralized discovery, and we collectively let it rot. Maybe it's time to bring it back properly.
I think the key issue here is that Attention is a temporal construct, meaning discovery is often tied to "being the first thing that comes to people's minds" which means SEO, reverse engineering the ranking algorithms, and constantly having to manage an "online persona". Note none of those things contribute to the actual work you're doing, just your "marketing department" (and whatever time/financial "budget" you intend to give it).
MrBeast figured out the YouTube algorithm - post early and often. Is that how we exist on modern Internet when every website/thumbnail is engineered by a team to maximize clickthrough rates? I agree RSS is useful, but it faces the same scalability issues if everyone starts filling up your RSS feeds. Given the limited amount of time you can devote to a particular task, we'll return to the era of A/B testing Headlines.
It’s still alive. Many sites still use it. Many people still subscribe to those sites. RSS reader apps are still being created to this day.
HTTP requires always-on + always-discoverable infrastructure
It's all over the place.
https://github.com/blue-monads/potatoverse
I have tried to get them to publish markdown sites using GitHub pages, but the pain of having to git commit and do it via desktop was the blocker.
So I recently made them a mobile app called JekyllPress [0] with which they can publish their posts similar to WordPress mobile app. And now a bunch of them regularly publish on GitHub pages. I think with more tools to simplify the publishing process, more people will start using GitHub pages (my app still requires some painful onboarding like creating a repo, enabling GitHub pages and getting PAT, no oAuth as I don't have any server).
[0] https://www.gapp.in/projects/jekyllpress/
When you publish to Facebook, WordPress etc you can't easily get your stuff out. You will have to process them even if they allow you to download your content as a zip folder. The images will be broken. Links between pages won't work etc.
Here's my small contribution to that. https://github.com/micro/mu - an app platform without ads, algorithms or tracking.
That always-on device? To get critical mass, instead of just the nerds, you'd need it to ship with devices which are always-on, like routers/gateways, smart TV's. Then you're back to being at the mercy of centralized companies who also don't love patching their security vulnerabilities.
(1) Security. An always-on, externally accessible device will always be a target for breaking in. You want the device to be bulletproof, and to have defense in depth, so that breaking into one service does not affect anything else. Something like Proxmox that works on low-end hardware and is as easy to administer as a mobile phone would do. We are somehow far from this yet. A very limited thing like a static site may be made both easy and bulletproof though.
(2) Connectivity providers should allow that. Most home routers don't get a static IP, or even a globally routable IPv4 at all. Or even a stable IPv6. This complicates the DNS setup, and without DNS such resources are basically invisible.
From the pure resilience POV, it seems more important to keep control of your domain, and have an automated way to deploy your site / app on whatever new host, which is regularly tested. Then use free or cheap DNS and VM hosting of convenience. It takes some technical chops, but can likely be simplified and made relatively error-proof with a concerted effort.
With IPv6 it would theoretically be possible, but currently with ipv4 and NATs everywhere, your website would almost never be reachable, even with fancy workarounds like dynDNS
The current wave of AI agents is diminishing the value of identity as a DDOS or content-moderation signal. The formula until now included bot = bad, but unless your service wants to exclude everyone using OpenClaw and friends, that's no longer a valid heuristic.
If identity is no longer a strong signal, then the internet must move away from CAPTCHAs and logins and reputation, and focus more on the proposed content or action instead. Which might not be so bad. After all, if I read a thought-provoking, original, enriching comment on HN, do I really care if it was actually written by a dog?
We might finally be getting close to https://xkcd.com/810/.
One more half thought: what if the solution to the Sybil problem is deciding that it's not a problem? Go ahead and spin up your bot network, join the party. If we can design systems that assign zero value to uniqueness and require originality or creativity for a contribution to matter, then successful Sybil "attacks" are no longer attacks, but free work donated by the attacker.
I would rather just read the thought as it was originally expressed by a human somewhere in the AI's training data, rather than a version of it that's been laundered through AI and deployed according to the separate, hidden intent of the AI's operator.
People post photos on Instagram and status updates on Facebook because their friends will see it there and give it a thumbs up.
A couple of decades ago, I spent a lot of time laboriously building a website for scratch for my photography. It was objectively a really nice site. I had my own domain, hosted it on a VPS, and put a ton of work into the layout and design.
But none of my friends ever thought to go there. I could see by my web stats that every now and then a random stranger would find the site... but they had no easy way of connecting with me and acknowledging that they saw it. If they put a lot of effort in, they could find my email address and email, but that's a hell of a lot harder than just clicking a little thumbs up button next to a Facebook post or filling a comment in the comment box.
Uploading photos to my site was about as rewarding as printing them out and throwing them in the trash. I thought about adding support for that to my site, but then it opens the whole can of worms around user-generated content, abuse, moderation, etc.
Eventually, I moved to Flickr, which at the time was an actual community that gave me that connection. Then Flickr fizzled out. Now, on the rare times I bother to process a photo... I just upload it to Facebook because that's where (a dwindling subset of) my friends are.
It's not about the content. It's about the human connection. A CMS won't fix that.
This is like talking about how book authors don't need Amazon when you have a printer and glue at home.
Yet your approach is appallingly low on the other side of the spectrum. I've been in IT for the past 25 years. I have yet to see a non-IT person who knows what dedicated IP is. If you are not publishing it on the internet, then what's the point?
I've seen plenty of companies where the owner just had a read-only shared drive, where people can rummage thru a pack of PDFs. This' was all fine with that.
You have to understand, manage and work with the complexities of the tools, and offer tools quite enough for the task. It's alright to offer what you do to an engineer who has a spare Pi and a couple of days to kill. But it's quite useless for anyone else to adopt.
https://inkican.com/mesh-middle-grade-scifi-thriller/
And self-hosting personal services makes sense and we're able to do that.
BUT, we don't own the connections. There's always going to be shared infrastructure for connecting these devices worldwide, and without an ideal state of Communism or utopian capitalism we're not going to own them or want to be responsible for them. Any kind of service that depends on a central database is not going to be communally owned.
Ownership is an economic problem, the technical aspect is merely interesting. Bitcoin might be a great example of this.
Simple to use software... this would be grand!
> Raspberry Pi OS (a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU Linux)
Is this simple? I would contend that it is not. Why do I tell people "buy apple products" as a matter of course? Because they have decent security, great ease of use, and support is an Apple Store away.
They still manage to screw things up.
Look at the emergence of docker as an install method for software on linux. We sing the praises of this as means of software distribution and installation... and yet it's functionally un-usable by normal (read: non technical) people.
Usability needs to make a comeback.
Apple stuff is a nightmare of dark patterns and user-hostile idiocy.
Maybe it's easy if you have Stockholm syndrome and have internalized all the arcane gestures, icons and bug avoidance patterns.
The average normie has no clue, though. (This is borne from experience, I have like 8 iPhones in the immediate family among children and seniors.)