alt Hacker NewsYou're always building a castle in someone else's kingdom.
If you're publishing on your own website instead of a social media platform, your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself, your hosting provider, Let's Encrypt, all the email providers you need to be able to deliver to (notably Microsoft and Google), and probably also your payments provider.
Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized, and it's no longer possible to build a site that isn't in anybody else's kingdom.
This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.
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At this point you only have your own kingdom if you have a standing army with nuclear weapons, you are sovereign, everyone else rents, this is just physics, the details are social contracts.
> your new Kings are your domain registrar, registry operator and ultimately ICAN itself
To whom have these bodies caused problems, to anywhere near the same extent as mass market social media networks?
Just because you are using someone else’s services doesn’t mean you’re in their kingdom.
Self hosting (which I think you should be) is more like being Luxembourg. Sure, you still have to appease the neighbours, and occasionally you might be invaded, but overall you still get to see your own taxes and keep the culture somewhat independent.
You can make a html website in a torrent. Works surprisingly well.
One time I had a copy of someones website that got deleted and experimented a bit.
The index was paginated linked page titles 50 per page. I combined the paginated pages so that each had 2000 entries (I think it was, maybe 5000) Then I wrote a bit of js that takes a search query from the url?q= looks if it exists on the page, if nothing is found load the next html document and append the query to the url. To my surprise it paged though the pages remarkably fast.
If you want to you could, in stead of display the content, display a search box on each page with the query in it, have a row of dots for the page number (on page 4 display 4 dots)
Displaying 50 or 500 blank pages one after the other goes pretty damn fast if you load them from the file system. They can also be pretty damn big. If you put the content in comments the rendering engine wont touch it at all.
When you update the website you can make a new torrent that has the same folder name and the same files inside. Run a check and the client will discover you had nearly everything already. The only restriction is that it may not change existing html documents.
For that you can just attempt to load non existing scripts in the folder. Have script1.js attempt to load script2.js and 2 look for 3 etc
Can publish updates on a telegram channel.
>But wait! Your mailing list is hosted by Mailchimp which is another company, and your website is hosted by GoDaddy or Squarespace? Aren’t they evil kingdoms too?
>Not really. They are just hosting platforms that are invisible to your followers.
>The general public doesn’t have to go to Mailchimp.com to read your newsletter or squarespace to view your blog. Your readers go to your domain.
> This is mostly a good thing, if this wasn't true, somebody would have set up a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it.
I doubt it is true, and I'd assume people have set up a site. If the media industry failed to exterminate torrenting with enormous economic incentives to do so why would the crusade against child abuse achieve more success? It isn't technically possible to stop people communicating with each other over the internet.
This logic extend to governments as well. It's a spectrum which in many ways the mega platforms are directly comparable in their economic impacts to governments. This requires a more nuanced analysis than a reductive "it's a private company".
> Despite what people say, the internet is not decentralized.
Do people say this? I’ve never heard anyone outside of web3 land say this.
IIRC it’s one of the big disappointments of the internet that is evolved in such a centralized way.
But also you can deploy a website which doesn’t rely on ICANN or a hosting provider, lets encrypt, email, or any of that.
Your only “king” would be an ISP (which you could also run yourself, if you were so inclined)
It wouldn’t be an easily accessible castle, but it’d be yours.
Full independence is nearly impossible
> a site that was a safe haven for child porn, and there'd be nothing that anybody could ever do about it
They could arrest the person and take down their servers, same as now.
When you get to this level of granularity the metaphor really starts to fall apart, but the principle is still there: identify your points of failure, the risk of them failing, and ensure there's a plan B.
Most businesses can treat their domain name as fail-safe. If you have a .com/.org/.net, pay well in advance, and aren't doing anything that's currently illegal in the US, you're not going to lose it unless there's a dramatic political shift that's earthshattering for ~everyone.
On the other hand, social media platforms arbitrarily locking you out is a daily occurrence for tens of thousands of innocent people per day. This isn't just a hypothetical risk, it actually does happen to people and businesses all the time. Even the most law-abiding business should not build their castle in a social media platform.