[throwanem]

> It's actually pretty friendly to non-technical users.

To use, sure. To install and administer? Not so much. You can get a Wordpress.com account, but that doesn't solve the ownership problem.

Sandstorm.io goes some way toward fixing the specific problem of Wordpress being impossible for non-technical users to install and administer. (Probably quite a long way, in fact.)

And that's great! For Wordpress. But it doesn't do anything to solve the larger problem of ownership of data, which - and I appreciate I didn't make it clear in the comment to which you're responding, but see [1] - is in this case a cipher for ownership of identity, which right now belongs to social media networks, which is another way of saying it belongs to Facebook.

It's not clear that something like Urbit is necessary to solve this problem. But it's also not clear that something like Urbit is not necessary, and I don't know of anyone else who's even trying to attack the problem directly.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12007854

[lisper]

> To install and administer? Not so much.

I ask again: have you ever tried? Because installing WP can be as easy as:

sudo apt-get install wordpress

after which all the admin is done through a web interface.

> I don't know of anyone else who's even trying to attack the problem directly.

https://owncloud.org

https://mailinabox.email

https://github.com/rongarret/BWFP

[throwanem]

Not for people already comfortable with VPSes and firewalls and SSH keys and command lines and apt-get. For everyone.

And that matters, because as I learned the hard way, being able to do it just for yourself isn't enough. A social network is social. If you're not on it and everyone else is, you still lose.