The Small Web is for people (not startups, enterprises, or governments). It is also made by people and small, independent organisations (not startups, enterprises, or governments2).
On the Small Web, you (and only you) own and control your own home (or homes).
Over time, the cost of running a server on an individual scale has shown itself to be more significant to the layperson than initially assumed. The cost is so significant that many small companies have started to try to shift as much of the server costs onto dedicated cloud and service providers.
And the cost isn’t just in hardware and internet connectivity costs, but also in manpower both in setting up these systems and learning how to make these systems operate well.
The idea sounds good, but I don’t see most people being able to work on the Small Web.
I looked at the article. Seems like vaporware at the moment.
The big issue with hosting your own stuff is configuration and security, NAT, sane email handling, bandwidth scaling, domain management, certificates, backup/restore, and issue resolution. Otherwise just build your own box somewhere. One has to make this all easy.
The other issue is that it is pretty unrealistic to re-write all of this stuff. Much better to pull together the pieces and solve the issues.
I only skimmed the video, but kinda paused when they ran a deployment function on a git repository, suggesting they are still just an external hosting provider.
This struck me as a traditional web host with a built in javascript framework.
If that is the case, why not just use Squarespace or Wordpress. I was thinking they were kind of going for something like https://www.freedombox.org/ or something. Frankly the video was kind of vague.
I think their edge is that they are privacy focused, you can take control of your own data and use non commercial services, like theirs to host your website. Maybe I’m misrepresenting them here, but thats what I got out of it.
In general, I’m receptive to a new creative space where people can make small fun sites and experiences again like before on the old web. But privacy was not the reason it went out of fashion, so I don’t think their pitch for what is essentially a way to host websites.
I’m sure it would be possible to self host a kitten site, but unless the code for their infrastructure is open sourced as well as their public tooling then there is both a hosting dependence, and vendor lock in, which is kind of the opposite of freeing your data.
Hopefully, I’m just misreading the project entirely, I don’t really want to hate on someone’s effort.
I agree. I am all for people trying other ways. The self hosting of stuff is an unsolved problem. By that I mean self hosting in a simple, cheap, secure way. FOSS makes it all possible but the effort of putting up a VPS is not for the novice and not without a lot of man-hours. One can get something like Synology NAS but that is in no way cheap. Even the VPS approach costs a fair amount once you pay the monthly costs and then pay for domains too, though it is not a lot.
Agreed. I found the process of buying a domain and a webhost to be both cheap and quite painless. Once logged in I would even be able to make email addresses and do one click installations of lots of common software such as wordpress.
I’dd say that if you just want to get your stuff out on the web without being under the umbrella of a larger corporation, the bar is quite low if you know where to look.
I would much more like to see this bloom into something that mixes with the fediverse. Some kind of easy to use tool that would allow you to create your websites, but also broadcast your changes and your content. Kind of like a webring on steroids
@furrowsofar User friendliness on the Admin side is definitely barrier. Until tiny box (like apple tv) can be sold with out of the box defaults and an easy to use app for “profile” setup, this may be a pipedream.
Yes. Setup, admin, and security is a huge issue.
