A Place of Your Own

There appears to be resistance growing to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and others that I really do not know enough about to consider. While I do enjoy seeing what everyone is up to each day, I also know that I have to be extremely careful how much attention I give these sites on a daily basis. I have come to miss the days when I would simply open my Google Reader and catch up on the feeds that I had happened upon in the course of stumbling around the internet.

I actually spend more time now in my current favorite reader Feedly. Yes I even have a paid membership, not for the extra capacity but because I write software myself and really value tools that just work. I maintain this site with a feed using a static site generator, sourcing my content in AsciiDoc and then publishing HTML. I’d like to think that almost anyone can do this. Then I read my notes and posts on configuring web servers and network configuration. I think the social sites still have an advantage there.

Looks like you can spin up a WordPress site with minimal effort. If you are willing to take on a little more work, you can register a domain, follow the instructions to spin up a droplet at Digital Ocean. The instructions are not hard, but I find they do assume more than a layman’s understanding of a website. All the same, you are still tied into the WordPress platform. I think we can probably do better with a more open platform, I just do not know what that looks like right now.

I think RSS and sitemaps solve the problem of discovery within a site. Lately I have been watching Interplanerary File System (IPFS) and Solid. IPFS is still in the alpha stage, I do not feel like there is enough there to begin to build a read/write platform there just yet. Solid is farther along, and addressing hard issues such as authentication and authorization. I’m also keeping an eye on Keybase. Their teams implementation is pretty nice, and they seem to understand that I don’t want to share everything with everyone on the internet.

I do not know what the post social site looks like yet, but I know I really want to control my own data. It seems like just publishing web standard HTML with some metadata to help find things is a good start.