I love this point about avoiding enshittification.
The most infuriating experience for me was the sudden pricing change of replit. I used to default to creating a repl when testing out an idea. However they did go through an identity crisis, and it feels like they are not interested in having people like me in their audience anymore.
I ended up cooking building my own platform for home-brewed apps: https://smallweb.run. Essentially, it allows me to have a new webapp available by just creating a new folder on my disk (with an automatic https domain).
Not directly related, but I’ve found that tailscale pairs incredibly well with https://mutagen.io/ to sync a folder between computers.
They have their own solution (https://tailscale.com/kb/1369/taildrive), but it is based on webdav, which is almost unusable on macOS. In contrast mutagen works as expected.
Thanks for the link to https://micro.blog/, it looks intriguing. You don’t mention SSGs + static hosting, but I think they’ve gotten pretty accessible and there are lots to choose from, one can mix and match and even move between hosts without too much trouble, if you own a domain. I think that’s sort of the natural way to approach the simple web.
But… people want to be able to leave comments, and there’s the rub. A comment can be (in my mind anyway) even below the “micro-blog post” threshold, but its context is fixed to a post, or perhaps to other comments. A commenting system pretty much requires identity management of some form, and then moderation… it gets complicated pretty quickly, and user expectations for feature sets have risen quite a bit since the early days of forums. There are several comment systems I’m aware of that are reasonable enough to add to a static blog, but then you have a third party. Or perhaps you can self-host on a little VPS, but then it’s no longer static-simple. Either way, real-time commenting exposes you to some risk, and requires constant moderation effort.
I’m fond of the old-fashioned, anonymity preserving, moderate-before-publish paradigm, but it’s too slow and too much effort for all but the smallest conversation. You can encourage people to publish “comments” about your blog on their own blogs, and thus sidestep moderation, but that’s much less accessible and gets disjointed quickly. Or you can just let a “social network” take care of all that, but then you lose discoverability and control. I wish I knew of a better way.
When I’ve dabbled in having comments I’ve been disappointed in the quality. IMO it’s not worth all the downsides you mention. I’d encourage bloggers to provide an easy-to-find email address, and I’d encourage readers of blogs to consider sending an email even if it’s “hey, I really liked this post!” As a long-time small-fish tech blogger these conversations do happen sometimes and they’re quite fun. Not all our discussions need to double as public performance art à la microblogging. :)
That said, when you do want to comment on something publicly the link-and-comment-in-own-post approach you mention is nice too. As a reader I don’t think it’s too bad to follow the backlinks. It’s gently applying a little structure ad-hoc where it’s needed rather than forcing all conversation into a threaded system to begin with.
A put my email address a few different places, plus I send out a newsletter.
A handful of times each year I get a genuine handwritten email from someone. It’s always a delight and I try to respond with as much effort as they put in to their message.
I wish I got a bit more of those random outreaches.
Smallweb tries to make creating dynamic websites as painless as static ones. No build / deploy step, you just create a folder in you internet folder and it instantly available at https://<folder>.<domain>. To switch between hosts, you can just rsync the an app folder between different smallweb instances, or even the whole smallweb folder.
Thanks for the kind words. I been considering starting a little monthly zine just to surface cool blogging stuff. SSGs alone number in the hundreds at this point. I do mention Jekyll in the post though which is a SSG.
You can have “comments” without too much fuss in your blog if you support WebMentions. Then using something like Bridgy, can help posts on microblogs mentioning your stuff appear on your blog. That is what I do with my blog (even though my third-party WebMention endpoint seems to be down atm).
Not sure recommending Microsoft’s GitHub for hosting is the path to breaking away from the corporations. The platform itself is corporate social media & there are quite a few alternatives that still fit free as in beer & freedom (or at least close to).
I agree with you, I recommended many types of setups there and the criteria was around what are the most common ones that people can find a lot of information about if they search. I recommended many alternatives there that I am not onboard with such as Github and Wordpress. My reasoning was around not pushing what is best for me but what can be an easy path for people. Also, it is fairly easy to move away from Github and carry your stuff with you, it is less than a silo than Wordpress which is a redeeming quality.
But I hear you and I agree. Been considering starting a zine to surface cool blogging stuff away from that mainstream stuff. Do you think that is something worthwhile to do? (just gauging if there is interest from people in this thread)
After my first reply to you I stopped to think about it for five minutes and decided to edit the post to remove the GH link. I left Jekyll as a mention of a good SSG. Added Bear Blog too.
Least bad option is post the link to your blog entry on your Fediverse microblog (e.g. Mastodon) account, then update your blog entry with the URL of that post as accepting comments.
I do like receiving email about posts, and on Gemini, it mostly works for people to just respond in their own blogs. But that’s mainly because Gemini is so small that everyone uses the same aggregators and is likely to see responses; it wouldn’t work for the web. Respond-on-blog and send webping/webmention works, but that introduces a non-static component.
Hacking on https://smallweb.run, my pet project of building a self-hostable serverless platform mostly based on SSH, contained in a single golang binary.
Not related to the article, but I really like the minimap you added to your website!
I’ve built a whole little platform to host an unlimited number of websites on my raspberrypi: https://smallweb.run.
In my experience, using cloudflare tunnel is a nice way to exposes services from a raspberry pi, without messing up with your router: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections/connect-networks/.
It also handles TLS certificates for you
I love this point about avoiding enshittification.
The most infuriating experience for me was the sudden pricing change of replit. I used to default to creating a repl when testing out an idea. However they did go through an identity crisis, and it feels like they are not interested in having people like me in their audience anymore.
I ended up cooking building my own platform for home-brewed apps: https://smallweb.run. Essentially, it allows me to have a new webapp available by just creating a new folder on my disk (with an automatic https domain).
Nice take on the moderately dynamic website.
I love that this is basically self hosted val.town!
yeah val.town is one of my biggest inspiration ! I also took some ideas from https://blot.im and https://pico.sh.
If you’re interested in following the development, please join the community discord at https://discord.smallweb.run !
Smallweb is a neat idea! Thanks for sharing :)
Not directly related, but I’ve found that tailscale pairs incredibly well with https://mutagen.io/ to sync a folder between computers.
They have their own solution (https://tailscale.com/kb/1369/taildrive), but it is based on webdav, which is almost unusable on macOS. In contrast mutagen works as expected.
I wasn’t aware of Taildrive, though given its alpha state and your stability comments, it’s a good thing I didn’t mention it.
TIL https://mutagen.io , might need to play around with it since it looks pretty cool.
Care to elaborate about the macOS issues?
I think it’s remote drive in general, which adds a bunch of latency when you’re trying to develop in them.
In contrast, mutagen works by creating a copy of the files on each ends, and then use a file-watcher to sync them
Thanks for the link to https://micro.blog/, it looks intriguing. You don’t mention SSGs + static hosting, but I think they’ve gotten pretty accessible and there are lots to choose from, one can mix and match and even move between hosts without too much trouble, if you own a domain. I think that’s sort of the natural way to approach the simple web.
But… people want to be able to leave comments, and there’s the rub. A comment can be (in my mind anyway) even below the “micro-blog post” threshold, but its context is fixed to a post, or perhaps to other comments. A commenting system pretty much requires identity management of some form, and then moderation… it gets complicated pretty quickly, and user expectations for feature sets have risen quite a bit since the early days of forums. There are several comment systems I’m aware of that are reasonable enough to add to a static blog, but then you have a third party. Or perhaps you can self-host on a little VPS, but then it’s no longer static-simple. Either way, real-time commenting exposes you to some risk, and requires constant moderation effort.
I’m fond of the old-fashioned, anonymity preserving, moderate-before-publish paradigm, but it’s too slow and too much effort for all but the smallest conversation. You can encourage people to publish “comments” about your blog on their own blogs, and thus sidestep moderation, but that’s much less accessible and gets disjointed quickly. Or you can just let a “social network” take care of all that, but then you lose discoverability and control. I wish I knew of a better way.
When I’ve dabbled in having comments I’ve been disappointed in the quality. IMO it’s not worth all the downsides you mention. I’d encourage bloggers to provide an easy-to-find email address, and I’d encourage readers of blogs to consider sending an email even if it’s “hey, I really liked this post!” As a long-time small-fish tech blogger these conversations do happen sometimes and they’re quite fun. Not all our discussions need to double as public performance art à la microblogging. :)
That said, when you do want to comment on something publicly the link-and-comment-in-own-post approach you mention is nice too. As a reader I don’t think it’s too bad to follow the backlinks. It’s gently applying a little structure ad-hoc where it’s needed rather than forcing all conversation into a threaded system to begin with.
A put my email address a few different places, plus I send out a newsletter.
A handful of times each year I get a genuine handwritten email from someone. It’s always a delight and I try to respond with as much effort as they put in to their message.
I wish I got a bit more of those random outreaches.
I feel like you might be interested in smallweb: https://www.smallweb.run/
Smallweb tries to make creating dynamic websites as painless as static ones. No build / deploy step, you just create a folder in you internet folder and it instantly available at
https://<folder>.<domain>. To switch between hosts, you can just rsync the an app folder between different smallweb instances, or even the whole smallweb folder.There is a live demo available at https://demo.smallweb.live
Check out: https://bearblog.dev/ too
Easy enough even on a static site e.g.: https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/static-comments-script-for-hugo-in-php/51924/2
Editted the post to include Bear Blog <3 thanks for reminding me of it.
Thanks for the kind words. I been considering starting a little monthly zine just to surface cool blogging stuff. SSGs alone number in the hundreds at this point. I do mention Jekyll in the post though which is a SSG.
You can have “comments” without too much fuss in your blog if you support WebMentions. Then using something like Bridgy, can help posts on microblogs mentioning your stuff appear on your blog. That is what I do with my blog (even though my third-party WebMention endpoint seems to be down atm).
Not sure recommending Microsoft’s GitHub for hosting is the path to breaking away from the corporations. The platform itself is corporate social media & there are quite a few alternatives that still fit free as in beer & freedom (or at least close to).
I agree with you, I recommended many types of setups there and the criteria was around what are the most common ones that people can find a lot of information about if they search. I recommended many alternatives there that I am not onboard with such as Github and Wordpress. My reasoning was around not pushing what is best for me but what can be an easy path for people. Also, it is fairly easy to move away from Github and carry your stuff with you, it is less than a silo than Wordpress which is a redeeming quality.
But I hear you and I agree. Been considering starting a zine to surface cool blogging stuff away from that mainstream stuff. Do you think that is something worthwhile to do? (just gauging if there is interest from people in this thread)
After my first reply to you I stopped to think about it for five minutes and decided to edit the post to remove the GH link. I left Jekyll as a mention of a good SSG. Added Bear Blog too.
Least bad option is post the link to your blog entry on your Fediverse microblog (e.g. Mastodon) account, then update your blog entry with the URL of that post as accepting comments.
I do like receiving email about posts, and on Gemini, it mostly works for people to just respond in their own blogs. But that’s mainly because Gemini is so small that everyone uses the same aggregators and is likely to see responses; it wouldn’t work for the web. Respond-on-blog and send webping/webmention works, but that introduces a non-static component.
Fish is just a joy to use! I still use bash for scripting for compatibility reasons, but as a shell it is unmatched.
These articles by julia evans are a good introduction for beginners.
Nushell is also a super interesting non-posix shell.
Hacking on https://smallweb.run, my pet project of building a self-hostable serverless platform mostly based on SSH, contained in a single golang binary.
I’m focusing on the cloud version right now (https://smallweb.live)