Sadly, I’m sure any social platform where one can make their own private community (actually private or perceived to be private) will have more of these than most of us think. Its just that we don’t see them.
I’m also not surprised that services like discord is seemingly relaxed at moderating them, as its a problem that is invisible to most users. Moderating is expensive, and unless it hurts public opinion, seemingly its not worth it for them
Feel like this would have made a great theme for Photoshop battles
I hadn’t considered that angle as a reason for wanting in on activitypub. That is actually quite devious
I think this is the web bubble bursting again. Venture Capitalists have piled money on a bunch of sites and products, we’ve become used to good free services.
The economy has taken a down turn and there is a increased demand for instant profitability and more and more social media companies realize they have overestimated how many people are willing to become paying customers. So they are forced to cut the product in order to save money instead.
I swapped to Linux for similar reasons many years ago. The initial idea was to hedge and get familiar with it so I had peace of mind. I ended up staying in the Linux sphere for most of my devices , except for my music production machine that still run windows.
I too love the idea of the “small web”, I’ve pined for it these last few years as I look back on the web of my childhood where there were many interesting and quirky sites compared to now where everything feels consolidated and interest for non-techies or semi-techies to have their own website is all but gone it seems.
I’dd like to share a website I came across a while back. I can’t remember the URL cause sadly I didn’t store it.
The site was a personal website of a photographer. It has a very unorthodox design and consisted of a bunch of repeating sections, each for a topic or category of content.
Each of these sections were a list of cards, scrollable in the horizontal direction. Each section has individual scrolling. The cards were either links to articles or high-res images.
The page loaded atrociously slow, and a quick look at the inspector showed why, we loaded about 300MB of images, quite the amount of code and it was clear that the entire site was made by a novice programmer, which made me immediately load all of the images that I could ever scroll into view. Quite the opposite of lean website technically, but definitely a small web website in essence and presentation. I think “small web” websites are small in scope and very personal. But whether or not they are small in size or features is less of a concern to me, I got spare cycles to burn anyways.
I think the web has for a long time lacked identity and personal connection, I hope that the renewed interest in federation and the small web will let more people express themselves more freely.
I checked out how much it would cost to for example make live streaming platform using AWS on the backend. This is an example they give on their cost/pricing page:
Approximately 10,000 viewers for a one-hour live event using a high definition (HD)-1080p encoding profile is approximately $12.50 for live encoding and packaging + $1531.49 for 18,017GB distribution = $1,543.99 for the one-hour event.
AWS is known to be VERY expensive, you can probably save quite a bit with a smaller setup, but I don’t think a longer 5+ hour stream would be cheap if done outside of these platforms.
I’dd love to hear if anyone has any real life experience with hosting large live streams like this on the cheap.
Agreed. I found the process of buying a domain and a webhost to be both cheap and quite painless. Once logged in I would even be able to make email addresses and do one click installations of lots of common software such as wordpress.
I’dd say that if you just want to get your stuff out on the web without being under the umbrella of a larger corporation, the bar is quite low if you know where to look.
I would much more like to see this bloom into something that mixes with the fediverse. Some kind of easy to use tool that would allow you to create your websites, but also broadcast your changes and your content. Kind of like a webring on steroids
I think their edge is that they are privacy focused, you can take control of your own data and use non commercial services, like theirs to host your website. Maybe I’m misrepresenting them here, but thats what I got out of it.
In general, I’m receptive to a new creative space where people can make small fun sites and experiences again like before on the old web. But privacy was not the reason it went out of fashion, so I don’t think their pitch for what is essentially a way to host websites.
I’m sure it would be possible to self host a kitten site, but unless the code for their infrastructure is open sourced as well as their public tooling then there is both a hosting dependence, and vendor lock in, which is kind of the opposite of freeing your data.
Hopefully, I’m just misreading the project entirely, I don’t really want to hate on someone’s effort.
I only skimmed the video, but kinda paused when they ran a deployment function on a git repository, suggesting they are still just an external hosting provider.
This struck me as a traditional web host with a built in javascript framework.
This has been a great boon to me. Whenever Apple upgrades Mac OS, I check my regional equivalent to craigslist for cheap music gear that stops working. Has worked twice for me. I got a really nice 24 channel audio interface for 20 bucks.
I loved Mariners line about the enterprise crew talking slowly. The difference in speed between the SNW and LD dialogue was something I noticed and this one line made it click for me. Fantastic