I was talking to a friend who was thinking about the internet we want to have, decentralized, less silos, a bit like the nineties where it was possible to have static pages, host email, write your own CGI scripts, and it was all step by step easy and possible if that was what you wanted. And we got talking about the kind of things we need to today to get this back. Do you have reading suggestions? Blogs to read? Projects? People to follow?
@kensanata I think about this a lot.
Neocities has free static hosting, and serves pages over IPFS, which is neat.
I run a gopher server on a VPS, along with a really basic tilde.town style service.
Once we've got home internet again, I'll probably start self hosting at least some stuff.
There's a pretty strong #indieweb community, but so much of it is focused on #seriousDevelopers, and thats... not what the independent web should be about.
@ajroach42 @kensanata I like situations that allow for a client to progressively take on more responsibilities, according to what they're interested in or comfortable with.
@ajroach42 @kensanata For instance, Mybinder.org handles hosting and running #Jupyter notebooks that are interactive; this is perfect for people that either aren't in a position where they would install and use Jupyter on their own systems or even could do so (lockdown), but it also familiarizes them with tech in a less-threatening way. I figure that this increases users' perception that they can handle technical stuff, and eventually explore running Jupyter thr slvs
@ajroach42 @kensanata More generally, this might be highlighting that services tend to hide away technical aspects from general users, making the UX seamless for clients until suddenly they throw up cryptic errors or provide l33t install documentation.