HN user
A few gaps in infrastructure need to be plugged first. We have most of the constituent parts, it's just that they lack administration layers suitable for modern internet users needs. It's work that requires overcoming inertia and tedium more than any particular smarts. (It'll likely go financially unrewarded too.)
Just of out curiosity, would you consider hosting your friends and families logs if there were a low friction way to do it?
I'm going to have one last go. Low friction network services are inevitable. There will be point and click, or since it's 2021, tap, interfaces for allocating resources (compute, DNS, storage, etc) to services. The technology stack that makes that happen can be composed of open standards, protocols, and software, or it can be a proprietary gated one. Either way it'll probably be built on UNIX, it's just a question of whether we'll get a seat at the table, or if it'll be UNIX in the iPhone sense.
We have very different ideas as to what complexity is required versus necessary, and we also likely have very different ideas as to what the competitive landscape for a product like yours is.
I do empathise with what you're saying, but there is nothing radical in your approach. It's a staid and common position in technical circles, and in my experience it lends itself to being blind sided.
Hopefully you will prove me wrong but I think I'll be proven right.
I refer to remote copying and ensuring proper permissions of a single file. And deleting in case. How more basic could it possibly be?
Loads! There's a lot of work to do here, maybe it's not work you're interested in - that's ok - but there is definitely work to do. Are you familiar with things like Yunohost, Sandstorm, and the like? This is a nascent field, in app terms it's barely at untar-configure-make-install relative to an app-store one tap install.
The permissions may be embarrassing and peculiar for Microsofters, but adding other tooling doesn't simplify.
I've had the experience of running a hosting control panel used by a couple of thousand users (organisations) and I can absolutely tell you that tooling does simplify things for users. It doesn't even have to be that good, every incremental step we made got more users using more things. Things they easily could have done themselves (they had SSH, Postgres, MySQL, Perl, PHP, etc).
I'm not worried about folks not learning UNIX system admin skills. I am worried that one of the proprietary service stacks (in which I include local ones like Synology's App Center) will become a defacto platform in the same way proprietary OSes have won on the desktop and mobile. Fortunately they're not much good at the minute, but it's a blue ocean for them if they get better first.
And to be clear, I'm not advocating that users should not have to learn anything. I don't know where the bar will end up, but I think it'll be far away from chmod, one way or another.
I don't see the distinction you're drawing. The ability for a user to get their data in and out of a system is crucial to a user's agency, as is the ability to provision and tear down a service at a name they control. UNIX system administration skills aren't a prerequisite for either of those things. That they are largely necessary today is a failing not a feature.
It's probably as simple as it gets given the set of constraints (I assume) you've set on yourself. To open it up to a wider audience you'd either have to have write some sort of provisioning tool (possibly a local app) or lean on someone else's (Linode marketplace, etc). DNS shouldn't be overlooked either as something troublesome for users.
If it's as broad as that then there's definitely some mixed messaging going on.
Is SSG a static site generator? I'm pretty sure Known is a SQL database backed dynamic kind of thing. I looked at it several years ago and I don't remember it being static.
You're right, I glanced over it too quickly. Installing it is still too much for anyone without basic web development or system administration skills.
I know very little about WordPress. I do know there are IndieWeb plugins for it. To what extent WordPress might be usable for you, I wouldn't have any idea.
From the chat log it's my understanding that the theme handles markup as opposed to plugins. So it seems unlikely that you could rely on plugins alone to get full functionality.
Those don't really steer it out of web developer territory though, do they? Known's an SSG, and unless WordPress has grown a lot I doubt it's a complete solution (not theme dependant, etc).
That meta chat room is something. Is that how you came to this thread? It's strange to see dismissive comments in there but no outreach to the sources of them. Feels very cliquey.
Becoming a "citizen of the IndieWeb"† seems to require you to be a web developer. Level 1 requires knowledge of HTML, or a CMS that exposes the rel attribute on links (is that common?). Level 2 requires specific CSS classes and... more than I can summarize succinctly here. And there's still Level 3 to go. It's hard to see this growing beyond web developers unless it's baked into other software as an incidental.
† https://indiewebify.me - linked in the article as "a quick start to becoming a citizen of the IndieWeb"