[jarcane]

> Start a site on Neocities, share photos on Pixelfed, or write your thoughts on Write.as — to name a few.

This would be a more convincing pitch if it didn't end with "now just use different centralized services that nobody uses".

We need protocols, not platform capitalism. We need easy self-hosting, not reliance on third-party middle men and rent-seekers.

I should be able to click an app on my computer and have my own web page running in seconds, that anyone can find and follow.

The fact we don't is how platforms like Facebook are able to dominate, and the even worse fact is this was deliberate.

[Cthulhu_]

> I should be able to click an app on my computer and have my own web page running in seconds, that anyone can find and follow.

There's literally thousands if not tens of thousands of hosting providers and software packages that offer just that. I can get some hosting with DirectAdmin to install e.g. Wordpress on it within minutes. Following is through RSS feeds. Finding is down to Google, which in turn is down to you, the author, writing good stuff.

[the_other]

> There's literally thousands if not tens of thousands of hosting providers and software packages that offer just that.

But most of them are incredibly confusing and off-putting to the majority of people FB attracts. Most contemporary net citizens don't have a functional mental client-server model such that they would even know they need a thing called hosting, let alone choose a service. And there's no tools that integrate a content feed, personal publishing, threaded comment and events/calenders in a coherent, secure, easy to use way. Most people barely understand that some code runs "in" their browser and some "on a server", or the relationship between the two. It can't be taught in a few minutes (it takes most of us here years to grok the subtleties and there's infinite edge cases).

To really get the whole FB experience, we also need "group-ware" (shared photos, tagging, shared calendar, private chat) with single-click installation, configuration and built-in templated branding.

You're right that all these tools exist, but they're fragmented and take time and knowledge to understand, use and integrate. And most of them are not interoperable.

> Following is through RSS feeds.

RSS is great in principle but all the tools that consume it suck: comment RSS feeds are treated at the same level as content, rather than "of" the content they refer to; most site still use RSS rather than ATOM, so you only get a summary of content; most readers keep you in-app rather than linking to full browsers, so you're trapped in webviews and inflexible, under-featured tools.

Yes, it's all "out there" but none of it matches the speed and comfort of FB.

(coming from someone who no longer has an FB account)

[jarcane]

Not to mention that going with a third-party host is still relying on someone else's computer being trusted with your data. It's like saying we don't need physical drives anymore because Dropbox and Google Drive exist. And yet that's basically the environment we've constructed for the web.

Beyond the barrier of technical knowledge, there's also a barrier of access: many people simply do not have internet access that allows true static hosting. Even setting aside the historical issue of IPv4 address limitations, there's things like ISP port blocking, packet filtering and snooping, rate-limiting of upload, etc., that exist specifically to prop up rent-seeking hosting companies and "business plans" that charge ten times the money for the same exact advertised service just with the blocks turned off.

My theoretical app basically can't exist anymore without a lot of awkward hacks. Windows actually still has web hosting features built-in, but I can't use them outside the local network because my ISP blocks the port for HTTP (as well as a ton of other protocols), and dynamic IP means I can't link it to a domain anyway without third-party tools like DynDNS. Instead I'd have to rely on tunneling services like localhost.run, or peer-to-peer protocols that piggy-back in clever ways on existing open ports, or else pony up for a business account and pay more money for, often, less bandwidth than I have now.

[saddlerustle]

> I should be able to click an app on my computer

The majority of internet users don't have a computer

[throwaway744678]

I believe the argument stays true if you replace "computer" by "device".

[wizzwizz4]

Neocities is a website; websites can link to each other. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's far better than nothing – and it's easy enough to move your website with HTTP redirects (to the extent that you can ever change a URL).

Pixelfed is part of the ActivityPub Fediverse, as is https://write.as (a https://writefreely.org instance). These are protocols.

[imglorp]

Pixelfed and Mastodon are listed, and they are both ActivityPub.