(9 January 2024)
Yesterday’s post about self-publishing and the indie web struck a chord, and provoked a great deal of comment and feedback on Mastodon. Thank you to everyone who chipped in.
These are the main themes of the conversation:
Hosting providers can do a lot to make self-publishing easier, because they know and control the hosting environments they create. One of the problems for anyone setting up their own web publishing tools is that they have to configure the tools for the environment that hosts them. Not all environments are the same. So this is a problem that won’t go away easily.
Some hosting providers already do. Several people mentioned a service called Softaculous, which allows hosting providers to offer customers a one-click (or at least, not-very-many-clicks) way of setting up a variety of software tools.
There’s not much of a market for what I’m describing. That means there’s not much reason for hosting providers to get involved at all. Most people are happy with self-hosted Wordpress, or a variety of other hosted services. There isn’t much incentive to create more.
Quite a lot of people agreed that it would be good to see more competition for Wordpress. I think this too. And I’d clarify that by saying: it would be good to see more competition for Wordpress, that’s as easy to set up and start using as Wordpress is.
Some people pointed me to desktop static website generators like Publii or RapidWeaver. I’m familiar with both. I would very much like to see more tools like these too.
The team at Good Enough are building many amazing little web tools, among them a blogging service called Pika. I’ll be adding that to the list of services I suggest to government teams who want a place to start working in the open quickly and easily.
Posthaven is still going! I like their promise to keep your stuff online forever, even after you’ve stopped paying.
There’s always Neocities, and as @cuan_knaggs pointed out, it fills a particular gap in the market very well.
Wa-Kamen also made a good point: “We still treat servers like something that the user/buyer will ‘administer’ somehow.”
There’s loads more to say but I won’t go deeper into the rabbit hole than that. Clearly there’s a great deal of nuance, market research, and technical expertise that I don’t understand and haven’t researched, all of which would go a long way to finding answers that help.
Even so, I still think there’s a need for more options and simpler options for self-hosted self-publishing. Judging by the reaction my post got on Mastodon, quite a lot of people agree with me on that.
giles (at) gilest.org