Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day
neatnik.net253 points by cdrnsf 2 days ago
253 points by cdrnsf 2 days ago
Personally I have used GitHub pages and cloudflare pages for hosting static sites and have been very happy with them considering the zero cost involved.
I don't think there is much difference between paying nearlyfreespeech (which I have done in the past) Vs using GitHub or cloudflare - you are still reliant on a third party for actual hosting. I don't really see any value in self-hosting myself - apart from nerdy satisfaction etc, I don't see the need.
The important part in my mind is the fact that I am manually controlling the assets - the HTML the images etc. Simple files on disk.
The git integration with GitHub and cloudflare though is obviously a huge boon though as now I have an off-site backup, and publishing is even more seamless than the old FTP/sftp days - just push to master from within vscode where you are editing the files anyway and it'll be live in 30 seconds (as well as backed up).
A huge advantage of GH / CF is that your site has a strong chance of outliving you, if that's something you care about.
If you're self hosting, either at home or on a VPS, you have to worry about domains expiring and credit cards being cancelled, which is inevitably going to happen if you don't have a succession plan in place. You could probably solve it with a bunch of lawyering, but that's expensive.
Free services don't have this problem. They can still go away, it's not a 100% guarantee, but it's a "might" versus a "definitely will"
How many free hosts from 20 years are still alive? Not many.
20 years ago was 2006. The iPhone wasn’t out yet and the internet was far from how big it is today. These days GH and CF are giants that are synonymous for code storage and the domain resolution respectively. So it’s rather unlikely that these household names of the internet will go down the drain in the next decade.
When you pay for something, you stop being the product and become the customer instead. That's a big deal.
I've never understood this mentality. Why can't they still sell your data after you pay them? Porque no los dos?
Watch "The Social Dilemma" carefully, and you will understand it.
The problem with Big Tech is not that they "selling your data". This wouldn't be that profitable to them. The problem is that they make more money by having tons of users and being able to build really accurate consumer behavior models, which then can be used to be used as a way to change mass behavior.
The most direct way is of course by having hyper targeted advertising, but this also affects people in many other ways in ways that are not to the benefit of the user: consider how the applications are designed to maximize engagement instead of being made to help users directly achieve their goals.
When you are the one paying for the service, companies succeed when they serve you better, and the money they can get from you directly is order of magnitudes more than what they'd get by trying to monetize your attention indirectly.
When you're the paying customer, it's possible (but not guaranteed) that they could see privacy as product differentiation.
In other words, if company A and B both offer you a product for $N, but A protects your privacy better than B, then A might get more customers. This competitive advantage can be an incentive for privacy.
However, there definitely limitations. If the value of this competitive advantage is less than the revenue they make by selling your data, then it's not a strong enough incentive. It also only works if consumers care about privacy and take the time to factor it into their purchasing decision.
With a free service it's given because they have to monetize end of the day. For paid services different businesses will have different strategies. Some have a solid business model and are content with it, some want to differentiate themselves using privacy, some simply don't want to take the reputation risk that comes with moves like this. Will there be some sleazy bastards who take your money and your data (cough cough gith*)? Sure, but they will get found out eventually and astute people will be able to steer away.
If it's impossible for you to be profitable without abusing your users in some way, then of course you're going to do so.
If it is possible for you to respect your users, then at least better behavior remains on the table.
That’s where being open-source is the hedge. I’m paying for your service and you still fuck me over, I have the option to self host. You start open-source and then start making the product worse? I’m forking and maintaining the old version.
So never bother with anything, am I right? Anything could be bad. Why eat the burger instead of the cyanide pill when there could be cyanide in the burger?
and almost every paid service too. Paid or unpaid is not a useful characteristic for determining if something will sell my data.
Clearly nobody thinks “paid = never selling data” and I have a hard time believing you actually think their argument is that simple and singular.
If something is paid + open source then you have a good starting point incentive wise for the provider but also if they mess with things under the hood someone will inevitably call it out and you can act accordingly. You also now have more options - you can fork it yourself, someone else may fork it and you can jump ship, etc.
The subthread was arguing about "paid," and you chose to make an argument about "paid + open source" because it was easier (you have no opponent), and then you chose to be condescending about it.
You’re right I accidentally added that element. But the core of my comment doesn’t change even if I remove that. Nobody thinks that “paid” = “not selling data” by default. And for them to act like that was asserted was a bit absurd.
Also I was not being condescending, I was expressing frustration. There has been a serious trend lately of people doing the worst possible interpretations of people’s comments and pulling “well actually…” style responses that borderline seem canned.
However, not paying does not mean that you necessarily become "the product".
Offering loss-leading products is a common business strategy and I'm perfectly okay taking advantage of this for hosting needs that fit a vendor's free tier.
Static hosting is very cheap to offer and gathering free tier users will gain developer mind-share, which helps the vendor can sell their truly money-making products. To pick a clear-cut example: AWS Lambda does not collect any additional data on free tier usage compared to paid usage.
Nearlyfreespeech is a great service though not a 100% independent as your still relying on them. I think the closest you can get to 100% independent without running your own internet infrastructure is either port forwarding from your home (if allowed) or hosting a website through TOR which isn't too hard. You just have to download the browser and edit a config file (torrc) with the port you want on the network. Not ideal of course though because anyone who wants to visit your website will need the tor browser and explaining to people that your website is on the "dark web" is a little hard to do.
I am a little surprised that doing so isn't more popular on in the indie web scene though as you do it on hardware you own, from your home, and the tor network protects people from knowing your servers ip address if that's something you care about. You could even go to your domain provider and have one of your domains redirect to your .onion address so people don't need to memorize it.
There also used to be the beaker browser which let you create and host your own website directly from the browser but that project got shut down. Hopefully something similar will show up at some point. Maybe a website creating plugin for tor would be enough to make it more popular.
+1. Why even pay the penny? Spinning a onion service is trivial...and...more secure than the clearwebz.
I've made a few easy to spin up services. Heck, you can even run it off your phone.
Nanogram https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/nanogram
Spreadsheet Server https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/spreadsheet
Library Server https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/libraryserver
Torum (HN Clone) https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/torum
I wonder if the fact that you linked to clear web source code links rather than onion links demonstrates why people might pay the penny…
Making something as easy as possible to try demonstrates why you need to pay a penny? I don't follow.
Yes, exactly. Because if you’d paid that penny for a server on the regular internet you would just link to the real site
Perhaps. Perhaps not…
A source repo link often gets more traction here than a link to what might turn out to be a closed, probably subscription based, service. The repo's main readme likely links direct to the product/ service/other main location [if the forge isn't being used as that] or demo location [if a public demo instance exists] should that be where I want to go immediately.
Though maybe posting both the repo link and a "live" link would be better still.
I just happen to not self-host my own code base. But your acting like I paid a penny for that, and self hosting git isn't possible, and we aren't on a forum which exists on the commercial internet.
What a silly deflection. The point is obvious: if it is as trivial as you are saying, why aren't you self-hosting?
I am? Just not my codebase lol. I don't see why the two ideas need conflated.