Gregory's Serverhot take but i think ISPs should return to giving every user a couple hundred megs of space on a public facing web server & encourage them to build little homepages. the corporatization of the web really hit overdrive when the persistent web presence of the average user stopped being a bunch of handwritten HTML and random files they wanted to share and instead became a profile template on a social media site
πππ
41 comments
Daughter of Rao
@enkiv2 or just give everyone true internet access, (No GC-NAT bull shit or similar) so they can without problems just host what every they want from any device at home. 
patter
@Mikle_Bond @enkiv2 @daughterofrao some of the browsers back then had built in html editors (possibly full site builders, it was so long ago I can't remember the details of Netscape 4) so there was general availability of tools so you wouldn't have to muck about in raw plain text html That could come back
S. John Ross
@Mikle_Bond @enkiv2 @daughterofrao In my case, I had hundreds of pages of weirdness on my old homepage but I relied on ancient WYSIWYG editing. I've never learned a lick of HTML beyond Bold and Italic and paragraph breaks, and still find the prospect intimidating. π But, I killed my homepage for so many reasons. I retreated to blog country, which felt like selling the farm and moving into a retirement village. π
knack
I host a whole bunch of stuff at home, but anything I want to make accessible reliably I put in a cloud somewhere with a local backup. Downtime is just too frequent otherwise.
Daughter of Rao
@knack Sounds you've got a Internet DIsservice Provider...
knack
@daughterofrao the lack of reliability is more to do with it running on my homelab (which I tinker with enough to make unreliable). ISP-caused outages are rare & short here, though I had a sustained one when a truck hit the lines. Putting static sites in AWS simplifies a whole bunch of things.
Theia π³οΈββ§οΈ
@enkiv2 I considered doing this in my friend group: getting a funny domain and giving friends Subdomains and static Webspace
copsewood
@tea @enkiv2 It's still possible to rent a virtual server and register a domain name basd on which you can create as many upload accounts, webmail and subdomained websites as your scripts enable for a few quid a month. I do just that, but the skills needed to do this are in much shorter supply than cloud capacity. Why just static ? CGI and PHP are still scalable enough for small sites. More secure if SFTP upload sites are chrooted, which open-ssh server makes reasonably straightforward.
Brook Miles
@enkiv2 my parents' ISP (their phone company) doesn't even run their own email service anymore, they migrated to gmail hosting recently :blobdisapproval:
Fluke McHappenstance :verified:
@enkiv2 enter "Roving Gang of Grandmas": we will need your help resetting our passwords so we can send the nice gentlemen from Microsoft the gift card codes they lovingly manipulated us into purchasing. Btw they told me to avoid a "Kid Boga" or some such - I dunno.
decryption
@enkiv2 I looked into this as a little perk for my newsletter subscribers and the legal requirements in Australia at least are so onerous - metadata retention, privacy policies, CSAM & terrorism risk assessments, etc - itβs just too much for me. The regulatory moat is real :( 
Xenofact :jrbd:
@enkiv2 honestly as much as I enjoy some social media, this. It also helps you stay tech literate and encourages useful personal stuff. 
tuban_muzuru
With every iteration of the Web, it comes built in larger and more useful chunks. Outfits like Squarespace can give ordinary users beautiful sites. I can't imagine life without Github now. 
The Doctor
@enkiv2 Having a personal website with any kind of media on it is considered a very strange thing now. 
Jason Lefkowitz
@enkiv2 For a long time in the β90s, AOL did this. For all the flak they got for being the ISP for the clueless, they gave every user a chunk of FTP-accessible webspace they could do whatever they wanted with. My first personal homepage, now long lost, lived there. I would love to see a revival of basic static HTML publishing again. Weβve put so many layers of simplification on top of it that normal people canβt publish anymore. But you can teach a normal person basic HTML in a couple of hours. 
Andrew Cook
@jalefkowit @enkiv2 I discovered Tailscale a few months ago, and one of the things I love is that it allows you to really simply and easily host a static page using the Funnel feature: https://tailscale.com/kb/1223/funnel/ It only requires a running machine of some sort, but it can be a Raspberry Pi sitting in the corner. No port forwarding, web server, SSL or other configuration to worry about, the app does it all for you! 
V is for...
Chloe Raccoon
Sean D
@enkiv2 I first learnt HTML because of free webspace and a sense of curiosity. I'm not a web developer (prefer back-end stuff) but I suspect that inspired many of my generation to become one. I can't imagine if I was a young person now, that I couldn't be bothered with the hassle. Also, my simple first static HTML page felt like an achievement that I could show off to people. That wouldn't be the case now.
Ryan Mann
@enkiv2 @TheQuinbox I agree and that would probably encourage more people to learn about things such as HTML. 
snep
@enkiv2 THIS!!! I think some in the responses don't get what having a website IS, since they're used to ugly templates like squarespace. Your home page is supposed to be fun and where you can make up an idealized version of yourself to portray. Mainstream Social media doesn't allow that at all, and other places its an uphill battle to do that in 2023. Why should I show you my ID to post on this broke ass borgsite? Lol. The more corporate things get, the more boring life is. 
Rich Felker
@enkiv2 Nooooooo, this was the worst - ISP lock-in thru loss of web home or email address if you switched. ISPs should have no involvement in your identity/presence on the internet. 
G (Nap God)
@enkiv2 ideally I agree but itβs already absurdly easy to set up a small personal website and people arenβt doing it so solving the problem of convincing people to do it in the first place needs to come first. 
JimmyChezPants
Radioactive take, and I'm sitting here glowing with gamma-level pleasure at the idea.
DavidB
@enkiv2@eldritch.cafe I'm not even joking when I say that the web should return to animated "in construction" gifs. |
@enkiv2 not a hot take at all! the days before PHP, of
cgi-binwere good actually!