I hope we’re winning back an independent, distributed web.
I fear that this is a niche phenomenon, and ultimately a mere Indian summer of the indie web before we lose it completely. I still don’t see non-technical people (defined for the moment, perhaps, as ‘people for whom using Jekyll is too technically complicated’) making their own sites outside of major centralized platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Medium etc.
I don’t know what we can do about this. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently because I want to run a workshop on how to set up a website, for people who risk getting kicked off a lot of mainstream web hosts for political reasons. I believe the best way to combat this is to use a static site generator, because then, if you do get kicked off, you can switch overnight by just FTPing your site to a new host (and you can back up your site by just copying files instead of messing with SQL database dumps, etc.). But many of these people are not technically minded and SSGs are significantly more complicated to set up and publish with than, say, WordPress. Unless that can be fixed, I think we’re doomed, at best, to an indieweb equivalent of 2000s ‘year of Linux on the desktop’ jokes.
I hope we’re winning back an independent, distributed web.
I fear that this is a niche phenomenon, and ultimately a mere Indian summer of the indie web before we lose it completely. I still don’t see non-technical people (defined for the moment, perhaps, as ‘people for whom using Jekyll is too technically complicated’) making their own sites outside of major centralized platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Medium etc.
I don’t know what we can do about this. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently because I want to run a workshop on how to set up a website, for people who risk getting kicked off a lot of mainstream web hosts for political reasons. I believe the best way to combat this is to use a static site generator, because then, if you do get kicked off, you can switch overnight by just FTPing your site to a new host (and you can back up your site by just copying files instead of messing with SQL database dumps, etc.). But many of these people are not technically minded and SSGs are significantly more complicated to set up and publish with than, say, WordPress. Unless that can be fixed, I think we’re doomed, at best, to an indieweb equivalent of 2000s ‘year of Linux on the desktop’ jokes.