A Website To End All Websites
43 points by FedericoSchonborn
43 points by FedericoSchonborn
Great messaging and I overall agree with the sentiment. I like to think in simple terms. I think asking everyone to host their own site on their own VPS can be interpreted as gate-keeping. To me, the most important component of the indieweb and content syndication is owning your own domain. As long as everything leads back to your own domain, it doesn't matter what IP it's pointing to. It could be a self-hosted blog or even just a service that lets you host your content on their platform.
It's the same with email: own your domain then you can swap out providers whenever you want.
Most blog platforms try to upsell you on using your own domain which I think is kind of silly in 2026 since blog or static site platforms can ask users to add (2) DNS records and that's it: https://pico.sh/custom-domains
Serving on-demand TLS with let's encrypt and caddy is a couple lines of code: https://caddyserver.com/on-demand-tls
It still seems like gatekeeping to make people figure out DNS records and TLS!
From the perspective of a typical person, the kind of stuff we take for granted seems, if not impossible, then way more trouble than it’s worth. Like, I’ve read exhortations about why I should do my own bike repair or make my own tofu, but I’m happy to pay money to outsource that.
It's incredible to me that there's still so little effort gone into making getting a domain and using it easy without ever seeing the word "DNS"
I get that you need an escape hatch. But it should be totally possible to improve in the current "registrar" experience by several orders of magnitude
Most shared hosting providers (who still exist) do domain registrations too, and mostly will set up everything up for you without having to touch DNS records (if you use the shared hosting).
For very random reasons, $WORK hired some guys to do their new website, and they delivered... PHP. As we already had some shared hosting nearly accidentally, I was drafted into setting it up- mostly because I'm 10 years older than everyone else in the company. I have lots of fun seeing the puzzled looks of younger technical people when I explain how things worked back in the old days.
I always hold that we've regressed somewhat. In 2000-2010 or so, I knew quite a lot of people who were not into software who would set up shared hosting and WordPress. I think us the nerds have shifted so heavily into Git + SSG that we've abandoned a bit the people who don't want to go so much into the deep end (mostly Git, which is way too much for publishing stuff).
This weekend I've been playing with old-skool Apache httpd with mod_userdir, learning about mod_negotiation (call me dumb, but I didn't know you could do OOB nice URLs without .html so easily). My main objective is trying out a few tricks to make it easier to serve mixed HTTP/HTML and Gemini content, but I feel you could do something based on Markdown that didn't require Git that could be quite nice to people...
Yes classic shared hosts are the pinnacle of what exists today and definitely better than any standalone registrar. I do think integrations with things you don't host / other services could be better
In terms of DNS, I think shared hosts are an illustration of «what you own but don't know». Folklore tales of losing such things go back centuries!
If you want to change the hoster, to actually take the domain you need to have some idea of what the domain is, even assuming the hosters are not doing any shady practices (and we know some do).
This can probably be solved by EU regulations (the only bureaucracy both bold enough to just say «nope, USB-C is mandatory», and important enough to make it stick) similar to cell phone number portability, but I don't expect this question getting enough attention at that level…
I wouldn't necessarily label it as gate keeping if they are not forced to do so. Being able to host your own site, repair your own bike, or even make your own tofu gives you empowerment and ownership over the things you consume. Not everyone has to (or wants to) and that is okay.
Edit: I wanted to type more thoughts about how I think about and asking some questions might help. Is it gatekeeping to encourage people to know how to change their car tire or battery? Is it gate keeping to encourage people to cook their own food instead of do take out every night?
There are tradeoffs to all of these things and you can think of the internet (and social media in the layman context) as another part of your life. Sure, you don't need to know how to host your own site for survival like you may need to know how to if you tire pops in the desert but you sure as hell should know how to cook if you care about saving money and having ownership over the food you eat.
How simple does it need to be? How do you envision starting a blog should work? Why should people care about blogging? Like you said, you'd rather outsource bicycle repair.
Obtaining an email address is about the easiest thing one can do. But I've got the email to prove that people don't even know their own email address! Make things too easy, and there's no reason to care. You have no idea how much private information I have to delete from my email that belong to other people who share my name.
I think asking everyone to host their own site on their own VPS can be interpreted as gate-keeping.
I agree with your overall point, requiring a VPS + self-hosting for something as simple as a blog is a needless ask. But I think gatekeeping in general isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Arguably even Lobste.rs is a pretty gatekept platform and it's very much to the site's benefit. What sets good and bad gatekeeping apart is whether the basis of who's kept out makes sense for the community, whether said basis is reasonably achievable by a good actor, and whether all good actors are given a fair chance.
Sticking by the example, getting in here was about 3 days worth of hanging out in IRC for me, which is anything but a huge ask. However, for someone who wants to come here and wreck the site, it's prohibitively difficult to get enough access to cause harm that cannot be quickly rolled back.
It's anecdotal, but in my experience communities with "everyone is welcome to try to join" instead of "everyone is welcome to join" attitudes generally result in more cohesive groups and better experiences for everyone involved.
To give a nit to your nit, in my vernacular of English "gatekeeping" is a negative term, i.e. implies that we are intentionally keeping people at the gate who should be let in.
I wouldn't use it to describe criminals or miscreants being denied entry, which is I imagine the intent of its "gatekeeping" (what would I say instead... community standards, perhaps?).
So I would say that, yes, gatekeeping in general is a bad thing. (Of course, sometimes you unintentionally keep people at the gate, which I'm sure happens here too.)
I see, I wasn't aware that it has negative connotations. I've heard it used for both before, so I assumed it's a neutral term that people use to describe both positive and negative implementations of "keeping people out". Pity though, it's a poignant expression.
You are technically correct but of course keeping out people who do not want to set up caddy from the internet is indeed the wrong filtering. I want content on ... idk..crocheting and I don't want only crocheting content from people who can set up caddy and have a VPS and a domain...
That was part of my initial point, yes. I don't think the Average Joe needs to wear a webmaster hat to be allowed to post on the internet. Though I wonder if and how sentiments might change if LLM slop reaches into the depths of even benign hobbies like your hypothetical crocheting.
It's a bit better, as you only need to know in person a person who can set up a domain for you (although you also need to know if they have enough integrity not to abuse their de facto control over the domain…)
To me, the message of a beautiful Internet would be much more enjoyable if it wasn't set in a tiny, unreadable font. I'm not just being negative, I'm asking the author to please fix the damn font size.
Most browsers I am aware of allow one to increase/decrease the font size. Even on the desktop.
I thought the whole page was beautifully done. I would not have thought about the font size had you not commented because I have a large monitor so all website text is fairly small. Overall, I felt the text was being intentionally used the help tell the story of the website in how it flowed across the page.
I strongly agree with the sentiment behind this post. Thinking particularly about where and how I found value in the early web, it was all those "hand-crafted" sites made by someone who really loved a particular topic and wanted to crank out a bunch of HTML to talk about it. A big challenge today, though, is where to put those hand-crafted websites so that they don't immediately get the hug of death from AI bots.That's had me thinking lately about going to more centralized services to ensure they can handle the brunt of the attack, rather than have to try to handle that myself, which ultimately will mean less bespoke things and more corporately-hosted ready-from-the-box things.
Every mention of Illich exposes the futility of lobsters topicality rules. The man is a theologian but we're not allowed to talk about theology. Computing exists in the context of society but we're not allowed to post links that talk about politics in a non-computing context.
It started promisingly but I disagreed with the assessment of the impact of the automobile and roads.
Like, in the old days if your village sucked work wise your only option was to move to another village (or travel slowly via animal) to sell your wares or for work. Same for services - if your village didn't have a decent X (doctor, blacksmith) you were hard up.
As a result of this enforced isolation strangers to a village were also viewed with suspicion and hostility.
Rapid transport made the world smaller, and I think a much better place.
After disagreeing so strongly with the author about the automobile I didn't read further.