[gaxun]

My "social network" is the internet. I can control where my domain resolves and I can serve content over HTTP and handle email via SMTP.

Anyone can link to my site from whatever social network they use.

I may or may not be able to link to everyone else, though. So far, I have no external links on my site. They're too likely to be broken in a year or three. If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site.

I hope I can continue to interoperate with other people like this. I have tried a couple other social networks like Hacker News and Twitter, but if they disappeared or acted in a way I didn't like, I could abandon them without much loss.

Do I have any reason to be scared that my current setup might become "closed" in the future? Not trying to be paranoid, just wondering.

[cm3]

Concerning external links, I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to have stable links whereas tech sites like /. do. Go to Wikipedia, and follow a few referenced links to major news organization websites. You'll find many dead links. Given that they use complex, professional CMS solutions, I don't understand why they would break links. It's not like they cannot serve ads for old articles. Wired's old articles seem to be there but barely so with sometimes broken img links.

> If I get email related to my site, I often post it to the site.

But only after consent from your the sender, right?

[test1235]

>I'm surprised that big news sites don't seem to have stable links

BBC is an exception to this - the way they publish their news pages means they have articles going back over a decade (with the original styling)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1537469.stm

[cm3]

That's brilliant, and I wouldn't expect anything less from the BBC. They are technically competent and innovated in the broadcasting space, like a few other networks did/do. It surely helped that the BBC have (had?) an R&D department.

[7952]

I love how they show the whole page as it was on the day.

[gaxun]

Just to be clear up front, my site is actively trying to be a demonstration of the ideas I outlined in the above post, in addition to being an actual site. It's still a work in progress and I'm letting it evolve piece by piece. There are many unanswered questions.

> But only after consent from your the sender, right?

I'm struggling to decide the right way to handle this. So far, if the message is substantial and I want to reply for follow-up, I also ask directly for permission. If it is a small message or I otherwise don't end up with consent, I'll remove any personally identifying information and/or paraphrase the message. You can see this in action at [0].

I'd love to know where most people think the proper line is. I usually consider direct email to be a rather private communication channel.

[0] https://www.gaxun.net/commentary/knuth-challenge/comments/

[ChoHag]

Have you ever maintained one of their CMS solutions? "Professional" has many meanings...

[drcode]

Yes, gaxun, you are living the dream and using the internet like it was originally intended- However, very few people can live your "extreme" lifestyle, it's cumbersome, enforces significant constraints, and requires significant technical knowledge.

You are one of the few people right now using the internet in a decentralized fashion- I hope that the recent advances around cryptography, mesh nets and blockchain systems will soon make it practical for more people to join your ranks!

[gaxun]

You can also call me a hypocrite. My MX records point to Google and my A record points to gitlab.com's GitLab Pages.

I'm actually not brave enough to open a few public ports on a server I own and manage and drive traffic there. It's a mix between "scared" and "it only took an hour to set up the entire thing the easy way."

But I can sleep soundly knowing that if any of the providers I'm currently using become incompatible, I can move things very quickly to a new location.

[__jal]

Take it at your own speed, when you're confident in your abilities.

Especially mail is difficult to get started with now - domains that don't have years of (spam-free) reputation tend to be blocked a lot, creating a bit of a chicken and egg issue[1] to get past, and it is... extremely frustrating to figure out what hoops j-random-webmail.com demands you jump through. Also, setup is complex, mainly due to the accretion of of anti-spam half-measures that need to junk up your DNS if you want people to accept your mail.

But trust me, even with all that, setting up mail today is still much easier than it was in the Sendmail days.

Assuming you're interested, and you want to, I'd encourage you to try running more services. When experimenting, don't keep private things on your host, make sure you have your machine access covered (passwords, keys, magic customer service phrases, whatever) and keep an eye on it. If it is compromised, consider it a learning experience and recreate your config (I'm assuming you're running a cheap virtual host; if this is hardware, that's a bit different).

It isn't that hard to do, and I think too many people are much more scared of running their own services than is sensible or real.

Netizens, arise! You have nothing to lose but your shackles.

And maybe some time that you otherwise would have wasted on Facebook.

[1] A few sites still block my domain, despite being single-owner, always spam-free and online for almost 20 years. I don't feel bad about not having them as potential conversation partners.

[ChoHag]

Setting up email is easier. Running email is harder.

Mostly because when running sendmail, well, nobody cared.

[detaro]

Having your own domain is a great start to be independent online: if you have a backup of all your content and don't use totally strange features of the underlying platform, you can easily move your content to whatever hosting you want while keeping your URLs intact.

If you want to look into what other people are doing with "my domain is (the center of) my social network", check out the community at https://indieweb.org – some clever ideas & tools around communicating updates etc between sites and integrating with existing social media where necessary.

[rsync]

"I'm actually not brave enough to open a few public ports on a server I own and manage and drive traffic there. It's a mix between "scared" and "it only took an hour to set up the entire thing the easy way.""

I love port knocking for this reason. You can take a baby step between not opening a port at all and opening it wide to the world ... for now, just open it up to yourself.

My sshd and personal HTTPS wiki are hiding behind knockd. I like the idea that they are simply invisible to the rest of the Internet.

[CaptSpify]

And, tbh, you should go slow. The internet is a wonderful place, but it is also terrible and dangerous.

I'm proud to run my own mail and webserver, but you do have to be careful

[sharemywin]

won't somebody just come along and put a pretty front end on cryptography, mesh nets and blockchain systems and hook it up to advertising and make even more money because their costs went down because of the mesh network.

[rsync]

"Do I have any reason to be scared that my current setup might become "closed" in the future? Not trying to be paranoid, just wondering."

Yes, a little bit, I think ... specifically with regard to running your own email server.

I have run my own personal email server for about 20 years and rsync.net and Oh By have their own email servers as well.

What I have noticed is that gmail (and AOL) consistently classifies my email as spam even though my configuration and spam scores are flawless. I am on 10+ year verified clean IPs, I have everything (DKIM/DMARC/SPF) configured ... and email to new addresses very, very often (although not always) goes to their spam folders.

Google/AOL/MSN/whomever are incentivized to not support private email servers.

If you have personnel and resources dedicated to making this work (as a medium/large business might) then you can keep up with this wack-a-mole email issue. If you do this on your own it becomes very expensive in terms of time and frustration.

Personally, I will not give up self-providing my own email[1] but in answer to your question, there is a lot of pushback against running your own SMTP.

[1] In fact, it is my ambition to begin self-providing my own dialtone ... providing my own VOIP service, etc.

[begriffs]

Nice, that's the spirit! I recently wrote an article about this concept, https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-07-08-returning-original-soc...

[platz]

Good on you - now just convince a billion other people to do the same and we should be alright.

A bunker does nothing to help avoid the war itself.

[tdkl]

How can we expect for humanity to explore space, if the majority is "nannied" from comprehending technology ?