[Illniyar]

This is a pretty weird article/movement. The greatest hurdle is almost definitely a domain name, which if you want to own the content you have to get. Which even the cheapest would cost you around 6$ a year. (I'm ignoring the "tk" tld, which is kind of a honeypot)

And you can host for a static site for free in a million places. CDNs free tiers are enough for individuals.

I don't get the preoccupation with hosting your own server, what matters is that you own your own identifier (in this case a domain name) whatever it points is vastly less important.

[hvb2]

> I don't get the preoccupation with hosting your own server

The field of software engineering is dominated by the smart people that do something not because they have to but out of curiosity.

I've hired a bunch of people and I was always looking for curiosity and drive most of all. A degree doesn't help you if you don't care.

[TheOtherHobbes]

There's negative curiosity involved in trying to reinvent the mid-90s web, but worse.

It's tragic that "your own domain and your own hand-written HTML" has somehow become a glorious ideal, and not a catastrophic failure of the modern imagination.

No one who is truly content-first and not tech-first is remotely (ha...) interested in any of this.

What content-first people want is a drop-in one-click package that sets up a server, secures it and keeps it secure, and installs something like Wordpress, but federated.

And is generally simpler, easier to set up, easier to use, and better.

And prettier.

(Email would be nice too, but we can't have nice things since the oligopolists locked that down with "spam filtering" of itty bitty private domains.)

Pick from a few themes, post, read, interact, leave the customisation and under-the-hood features until later, if you get around to it all.

That's it. That's a what will create a true content-first indienet.

Anything else is just FOSS tinkering for the sake of tinkering, not a credible attempt to create an open platform.

[latexr]

> The field of software engineering is dominated by the smart people that do something not because they have to but out of curiosity.

Emphasis mine.

We wish. I think the state of tech pretty conclusively demonstrates those people aren’t the ones who dominate. Money and power hungry tech bros do, which is why everything is shit and exploitative.

[hvb2]

The tech bros are the ones that control the companies, not the field of software engineering.

[latexr]

They’re both. There are finance tech bros “idea guys” whose aim is to be at the top of the company, and other tech bros who got into programming for the high salary and clout of being able to say they work at or are ex-employees of Facebook, or Google, or whatever.

The shit and exploitation don’t build themselves.

[cowboy_henk]

6USD per year adds about 0.016USD per day. Definitely more, still pretty cheap.

[filleduchaos]

What part of this pretty weird article proposed hosting your own server?