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Make your website of record your website. Make social media platforms and others (e.g. Google) secondary to that. Don't let Google and Facebook control how yo
by doke01 9y ago
Make your website of record your website. Make social media platforms and others (e.g. Google) secondary to that. Don't let Google and Facebook control how you build your website. I am amazed at companies that take their websites and subjugate them to their Facebook page. You may gain social attention but you are handing over control. Never, ever, ever say to contact me go to facebook.com/xxxx or my email address is xxx@gmail.com. Your site is yoursite.com and your email is youremail.com. Your login to the sites you build are email addresses, not tied to social media providers. The closed internet providers are enhancements to your sites. They do not take the place of your site. If you follow this philosophy, you are supporting the open internet. Own your .com. Don't let others own you by taking that from you.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoLooks like there's a typo in your first sentence. I could sort of figure out what you meant, but it took a bit of digging. EDIT: Never mind, I was straight-up wrong. Sorry!
- mysterypie 9y agoYou mean the following sentence? > Make your website of record your website. I don't see a typo (and your comment is 3 minutes more recent than his, so I don't think he made any corrections). Maybe "record" is throwing you off? What he means is that "Your official or authoritative website (i.e., website of record, like owner of record) should belong to and be controlled by you." Edit: If you're saying that the sentence could be hard to parse, yes I agree.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- odbol_ 9y agoAh, much better way of phrasing it. Thanks
- gitpusher 9y ago* website-of-record should be your own.
- rdiddly 9y agoThat's good. I'd probably have used quotes to indicate I'm using a phrase that's made up or not very common. Your "website of record" should be your own. So-called. If you will.
- curiousgal 9y ago>Don't let others own you by taking that from you. Others doesn't include whoever provides your MX records.
- deegles 9y agoI don't generate my own power either, the line has to be drawn somewhere.
- gnopgnip 9y agoIf whoever provides your MX records decides they no longer want to serve you it is no problem to change that with your DNS provider. If Facebook decides to close your business page you have no alternative to maintain those connections with customers or for advertising.
- kakarot 9y agoOk, but what about the other 99% of the population who are too busy to completely learn ops and opsec? My mom isn't going to leave facebook to make her own website and host her own email, even if you give her all the tutorials in the world.
- sjg007 9y agoWebsite in a box (docker), put it wherever. This might be a good idea.
- thoaionline 9y agoThat's a fine business idea.
- kakarot 9y agoI like the idea, but the goal would be to make configuration, deployment, maintenance, and good security as easy as possible. So easy that you don't have to touch a command line. Mind expanding on the idea a bit?
- zakki 9y agoI think It is time to reinstate geocities.
- livingparadox 9y agoYou might be interested in its spiritual successor neocities, then https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
- kyledrake 9y agoAnd the founder of Neocities thinks it's time to instate a distributed web https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2015/09/08/its-time-for-the-distributed-web.html https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2015/09/08/its-time-for-the-...
- paulcole 9y ago> You may gain social attention but you are handing over control. Yeah it's a tradeoff and for many people giving up that control is worth it.
- Spivak 9y agoI maintain a website for a small nonprofit in my town. We did our best to get our name out there directly but 90% of our hits came from Facebook. For worse the site has serious levels of engagement.
- periegetes 9y agoNo it's not. They think it's worth it until the negative aspects catch up to them. Then they weep. Due to some unexplainable optimism, people always believe that injustice won't happen to them. Just like with car accidents. And just like with car accidents, there should be some sort of "insurance" against unforeseen douchebaggery. It's like this : - let's say there's a 1% chance of FaceGoogle abuse for anyone - when faced with that 1% chance, most people (99,99%) will choose to forego the insurance - 0.99% of people are now vulnerable to injustice People are not as rational as we'd like. We don't have a very good sense of how likely something is to happen, especially when the probabilities get smaller.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ewjordan 9y agoBy making your email something custom instead of @gmail, you're spending some energy, time, and money to protect against a perceived threat. I guess my real question is, what exactly is that threat, how damaging is it, and how likely is it to occur? By my mental math, I can't really justify spending even a few bucks, or more expensively, a few hours, protecting against some consequence that I can't really quantify at any real level of risk. For business, sure, because there are other benefits to having a custom domain, but for personal stuff, I don't really see the cost/benefit analysis making sense. The biggest threat seems to be that the government will have my data and I'll be advertised at, but having my own domain doesn't help either way. Am I missing something?
- ben174 9y agoYou can still host your domain on google apps which is simple and painless. The key is that you can take your domain with you and move it wherever you want later on, if you choose to.
- tudorw 9y agoexactly, you can protect yourself from a lot of manipulation over time by owning your own domain and always look to build traffic into your personal control, while 3rd parties often offer attractive propositions, the fact that any community built on their platform is not yours to truly 'own' is an issue over time and a risk that is easily mitigated by paying a yearly domain fee.
- pyre 9y agoExactly this. I'm lucky though in that I signed up when it was Google Apps for Domains (and free). I've been using it for years without paying (having been grandfathered in). If I ever decide that I don't want to be on Google anymore, I can take my domain and move to (e.g.) FastMail without having to go through the pain of shifting everything over. I don't have to: * spam everyone I know to use a new email address. * go through authorship information in any READMEs out there for projects I may contribute to. * deal with an invalid email address embedded in public commits (ala Github). * deal with possibly important, time-sensitive emails ending up in a blackhole. * updating email information for online accounts. Especially for sites that use a combo of email address/password rather than login/password. * etc... I only have to pay ~$12/year (or less if I buy years in bulk) to keep the domain, and I also get the benefit of being able to grant emails on the domain to other people too.
- will_brown 9y agoI have been attempting this for sometime with: http://hyperlinkserver.com/webdesigning/tomorrow/ http://hyperlinkserver.com/webdesigning/tomorrow/ I have had multiple developers quit and don't have the $80k budget quoted by Gigster. Concept: in the same way you might register a username/handle on ig/twitter a user registers a new domain (or "connects" a domain the user already owns). Using Enom API we also offer "branded" email and private registration, and in the background the name records are automatically pointed to their "tomorrowbook page". By logging into tomorrowbook the user can use the "text tool" to add posts to their website, basic website analytics, and ability to customize their follow/like buttons...also access the tomorrowbook email client for their branded email, not unlike a social messaging tool only open bc it works on email protocol. Obviously the explanation above changes just a little for users who own domains with 3rd party registrars and/or using 3rd party hosting. How can HN help? If there are any developers who can get the Enom API out of sandbox and fully functional where my other developers have quit.
- kayimbo 9y agoI kind of like that idea! have you looked into getting a single technical consultant to help you outsource to india?
- markshead 9y agoI'd be happy to talk with you about what you are doing with the API. I don't know if my company would have time to write it for you, but I'd be happy to talk through it with you and offer some suggestions.
- JoshMnem 9y agoAdding to that: don't host your content on other domains either. Beware of insidious threats to the WWW, like AMP.
- theWatcher37 9y agoAwesomely Malicious Performace
- alt2501 9y agoAwesomely Malicious Protocol
- ftflfx 9y agoI don't really understand this? I've never used AMP directly but I use Ghost which comes packaged with AMP. How does AMP change the domain of your content?
- jeremija 9y agoGoogle uses AMP for caching. When you click on the link, they are serving cached content from their own servers. They say it promotes user experience because it is faster. The average user can hardly tell the difference, and they might never go to your server.
- pgeorgi 9y agoIt really depends on what you want to do: disseminate information (with a canonical URL that you control) or shovel users to your server? In the former case, AMP caches are a reasonable compromise since it's really just a free CDN. In the latter case, that cache is annoying because of how it needs to fit in the design of the contemporary web. See the last paragraph of https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exist/ https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2017/01/13/why-amp-caches-exis... for some ideas on how to improve the platform so the caches wouldn't be necessary for much of AMP.
- Pxtl 9y agoI was with you until logins. I'm tired of creating accounts and managing umpteen million passwords.
- wishinghand 9y agoI only know two passwords: one for my password manager and one to unlock my computer.
- cuonic 9y agoBut you're still "managing umpteen million passwords", hence the name password manager.
- nilved 9y agoThat makes no sense. You use a password manager so you don't need to manage the passwords. If you don't like the concept of having passwords at all then use a stateless, hash-based password generator instead.
- fuzzybeard 9y agoWhat's the alternative? To authenticate against our FB account? I'd much rather have a distributed system than to be forced to maintain a FB account just to login.
- jwint162 9y agoThe problem with this is that these platforms thrive because of their existing network effects. Even if you own your very own well built .com the vast majority of these dot coms will still have a combination of facebook, twitter, youtube accounts etc which mirror content available on your personal site. This provides distribution that is otherwise difficult to come across. I have been working on a purposed solution over at http://www.peerprofile.com http://www.peerprofile.com which allows creation of a personal domain and instead of getting locked in provides an open model.
- profalseidol 9y agoIn the near future, use DApps (Decentralized Applications) a few of them are already up and running.
- jstanley 9y agoI like the prospect of DApps with the client-side code served out of IPFS, and the backend on Ethereum.
- ookie 9y agoYeah, I completely agree. There are already some services in this space trying to combat filter bubbles and walled gardens, Akasha [https://akasha.world/ https://akasha.world/] for social networks, DNN Media [http://dnn.media/ http://dnn.media/] for news and Lemon Email [https://ipfs.io/ipns/dapp.lemon.email/#/ https://ipfs.io/ipns/dapp.lemon.email/#/] (dApp and the full beta version) for email system. The last one is completely in line of what you're talking about. I like the approach through blockchain systems because, if used properly, they have the potential to become direction in favor of democratization and decentralization of information.
- mark_l_watson 9y ago+1 totally correct Social media works well for announcing stuff on my own web site (new blog articles, new releases of open source projects, new books I have written, etc.) Hosting long form content of someone else's domain is not playing the game right.