Sure, it’s fine. But if I’m only publishing text and photos, and I don’t need tons of specialized plugins, and I’m dealing with things myself - then personally I will go with a static-site generator every time. It’s at least as fast, and more secure by design.

Did not know that. Useful.

Full DB-driven monster for a few bytes of text. Sledgehammer to crack a nut if you ask me. But sure, this is the obvious answer.

Even more interesting IMO: what are the options that do not involve self-hosting (thus avoiding the PITA of babysitting a domain and server security)?

But surely the average Zuckerbook user is not so dumb as to miss what this graphic is describing - a crazy utopia where they could talk to people on TikTok and Xitter as well as Zuckerbook?

Possibly it’s about personality types. I was only going on my own experience. Of always being told by a chorus of experts “Oh no you don’t want to do that!” and ending up being terrified to touch anything. When I now know that I usually had nothing to be afraid of, because dangerous things tend to be locked down by design, exactly as they should be.

it depends how secure you want your network to be. Personally I think UFW is easy so you may as well set it up

IMO this attitude is problematic. It encourages people (especially newbies) to think they can’t trust anything, that software is by nature unreliable. I was one of those people once.

Personally, now I understand better how these things work, there’s no way I’m wasting my time putting up multiple firewalls. The router already has a firewall. Next.

PS: Sure, people don’t like this take - you can never have enough security, right? But take account of who you’re talking to - OP didn’t understand that their server is not even on the public internet. That fact makes all the difference here.

Immutable distros like NixOS don’t stop you from tweaking stuff, they just record every tweak centrally, so that you can undo them and do rollbacks.

Others can confirm that I’ve got that right. Haven’t tried it but the idea sounds great.

I would like to have a system when I know what I did, what is opened/installed/activated and what is not

Story of my life after 20 years on Linux. Maybe we could call it “modification anxiety”.

I believe this is the case for an immutable OS.

Ha, good analogy.

This sounds like an elaborate way of saying you want to blog.

Or, as the kids call it these days, “to post on my Substack”. The two things being identical except that the latter sounds cooler and allows them to indulge their corporate Stockholm syndrome.

Very interesting perspective! And yes, I keep all my data locally, literally all of it, and the only bits of it that go on my VPS or - worse! - mobile device are either encrypted or not private. So your theory is right on the mark.

Worth remembering that the benefits of open source are less critical with server-side software compared to when it’s your own personal computer. Personally, if it’s SAAS then I’m not much bothered what they’re running it on. Not to invalidate your general point.

automatically modify a YT link to a designated invidious instance or whatever

Surely that’s the link that should be posted, then?

using your GitHub

It’s not yours, it’s Microsoft’s.

This is a really good question. I’ve also been wondering why there seems to be no obvious go-to service for blogging, i.e. full-form authored text, in the same way there are for photos (Pixelfed), video (PeerTube), and of course microblogging and discussion forums like this one. Seems like an oversight.

Yes, there’s WordPress. But IMO WordPress is just overkill for most use cases, with its massive database backend. Text is text, the web was designed for text and it worked before databases existed. A static site generator will generate a flat text site just fine (I’ve used them) but you need to host it.

Someday I’ll try self hosting but for now, I’ll pay for decent services.

Maybe you shouldn’t even need to try?

I’ve changed my mind on this one. I used to believe in the utopian internet dream of everyone hosting their own stuff on their own domains. But managing domains and hosting are both a PITA. They require money, technical expertise (because security), and commitment (or else your site goes away). The URL of a blog article posted, say, right here is probably going to be more permanent that it would be on the average private site. And Archive.org is recording the content either way. I’ve come to the view that sites should be left to organisations, and individuals should do themselves a favor and just affiliate themselves to one of those sites. Against payment if appropriate.

Which leaves the question of which site?

There’s a lot of debate around the Bluesky relay and whether or not it’s posible to “scale down” ATProto.

Luckily, with all the attention that Bluesky and ATProto have gotten lately, there’s a lot of interest in running alternative relays just in case things go bad, and I think it may be possible that funding for a public good relay might materialize to protect from the potential failure or compromise of the Bluesky relay.

But I also want to draw attention to another non-obvious thing about ATProto: the relay is not required.

Let’s do a thought experiment. […]

Etc. But I’m certain everyone here has actually read the article so they’ll already be familiar with that thought experiment.

Fair point.

So. Nobody gonna push back? It’s quite a convincing article. Especially this bit:

This is something I want to put a bit more focus on: how important the PDS is.

Giving people their own PDS is soooo crucial to having a free ( as in freedom ) internet. This needs to be something that I can:

• Self host or have somebody else host for me
• Download all of my data from, whenever I want to, and
• Grant other apps read and write access to

That last piece is crucial to the existence of all of these different ATProto apps. We are giving people their own data store and then letting them connect that to all kinds of different tools and experiences.

It does at least seem like the protocol is more sophisticated, and so perhaps carries more potential, than (say) the one powering this site.

True in spirit but not to the letter. You can fire up your own server and federate Bluesky. The issue is that Bluesky’s centralized design means that you would be hosting a clone of literally all the data, which requires serious infrastructure and expense. But the protocol is open, so in theory an alternative provider (with resources) could do it.

If all Xitter users decamped to Bluesky, that might create incentives for more providers to step in, creating some competition and accountability. Non-profit foundations with deep pockets could do it, for example. That would definitely be an improvement compared to today’s corporate social media.

But I agree that ActivityPub is the more democratic solution.