Aral Balkan

> I am on the side of Neopets forums and Geocities and uploading mp3s of shitty songs onto your iWeb website. I’m on the side of blogging and learning about ARIA roles and finding a small circle of nerds Worth reading 'What is the Small Web?'[0] It's worth having your own little corner of the Internet that isn't social media, but a site you own and maintain with care, a labor of love, so to speak. And you have full control over it. You can't get 'suspended' for sharing an edgy meme. [0] https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/

Genuinely interesting observation. From a design perspective, that's probably the case. E.g., the other objectives cannot be otherwise achieved. From a moral primacy perspective, though, I'd say not. Serving the interests of the owner/operator first would be the initial moral requirement, the others follow from that. I'd suggest that Aral might also want to consider another famous set of Three Laws proposed by I.A. (not to be confused with A.I). There are some additional suggestions in the Mastodon thread: https://ar.al/2021/12/18/the-three-laws-of-personal-devices/

Aral Balkan recently demonstrated running a web server from his new Pinephone using the site.js framework he developed and live-chatting with his viewers with it. Really cool. He said the phone is definitely still not ready for everyday use, but great for devs obviously. https://ar.al/2020/07/12/live-stream-a-web-site-on-your-phone-with-sit…

Previous discussion on more recent post on the same incident from same blog: https://ar.al/2020/01/13/apple-says-no-and-what-that-means-for-the-fut…

Let’s build it: The Sovereign Individual (1997) + The Sovereign Consumer (2018) + AI Community of people that practice and develop tools for achieving digital sovereignty, digital immortality and autonomy. Roadmap of products: • social co-pilot | social os for building and maintaining relationships with best people • life OS — ai-native workspace with long-term tasks to be executed by ai, gamified, execution-free. • self-hosted automated LLM-based recomendation system (aka beeper.com + Loyal AI) with MCPs and A2A protocol. • self-hosted self-sovereign identity (ref. timelinize.com + https://beepb00p.xyz/hpi.html Roadmap of problems to solve: • solving loneliness and isolation for people (stop losing people and messages from) • solving social engineering for senior people • solving productivity for power users through automations References: • socialinbox.dev • lifeweeks.app • timelinize.com • beepb00p.xyz/hpi.html • beeper.com • reddit.com/r/DataHoarder • reddit.com/r/selfhosted/s/n8uxvYYa1V • https://postplatforms.org • book: The Sovereign Individual (1997) + Sovereign Consumer (2018) • small web / small technology https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/ • indieweb.org 1000 people sovereign community • #quantified self • independence part of diagram.website

I have currently found myself in love with a new topic (new for me), “The Small Web”. Which is not completely new or strang actually, as I have been doing so in the first days of my web dev journey, when I uploaded sites (html and php files) using ftp (Fillzila?) and Boom the site was online (let’s assume the domain&dns were already set). Those days I was more focused on building what I had in my mind rather than getting stuck on NPM, lots of dependencies, deployment, Https, and etc. How did I meet the small web? I was looking to simplify my web dev stack researching and looking for the tools that could simplify making a simple web app. Tools that can help indie devs make their MVP ⌛quicker/easier and launch asap, rather than getting stuck on the development/building phase and/or worrying about scaling issues from day one (what I did before). What is the small web? Who can explain the small web topic better than my friend Aral, the man behind the amazing “Kitten” project. FYI “Kitten” is a complete Small Web development kit. Which is exactly the tool I was looking for. Here is a part of Aral’s note on “The Small Web” and a link to it to read more. You can also visit my blog (linked above). I will write more about this topic, and also sharing any helpful resource that can simplify our job in making websites and web apps. Aral says: “ The Small Web is the Single Tenant Web Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one…

I'm not sure what they ran, but if it's Mastodon: it scales in troublesome ways. For one, it uses Rails and is very big. Rails is known for being extremely slow¹. A difficulty with ActivityPub is that it scales rather weird. If your server has (accounts with) many followers, you're essentially DDOSsed through activity. So it scales weird in the sense that not activity on your server demands Resources, but that activity on the fediverse, which you don't control, does.² So it can get very expensive really fast. Maybe something like gotosocial could lower these costs. But that's not "stable" (as in: frequent, disruptive upgrades and missing features) enough for a govt, I'd say. Its software design, however is far better aligned with a server with relatively few (one, or a few dozen) accounts. Accounts that can have large following and activity. Whereas the Rails project is much better aligned with servers with (tens of) thousands of users. I.e. with mastodon.social. 1 I've been helping companies scale and tune Rails for over 12 years now. I know it can be done, but also what the limitations are. They are real. ² https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-ev…

Your coworker gets it :) It’s simply a matter of business models – you don’t even have to like Apple or think they’re lovely people (everyone I’ve met there has been). Google’s business model is to digitise you and own that digital copy. They use this proxy of you to manipulate and exploit your behaviour for profit and to indirectly rent access to aspects of you to their customers (currently, advertisers). Apple’s business model, on the other hand, is to make great tools and sell them to you at a price that makes them happy. (So if you were to buy an Android phone and never use it, Google would be very unhappy. If you buy an Apple phone and never use it, Apple’s still made their profit.) To cut a long story short, privacy is an absolute competitive advantage for Apple. It is a thing that they can compete on without breaking a sweat (as it doesn’t impact their bottom line negatively) whereas, if Google was to try, they would go bankrupt (as their business model depends on profiling you and violating your privacy). All you need to understand to grok why Apple is protecting your privacy is that multibillion-dollar corporations don’t get an absolute competitive advantage over their main rivals everyday and – if you do find one – you’d have to be an absolute idiot to squander it. (And I don’t believe the folks at Apple are idiots.) So yes, Apple’s systems are proprietary and closed, and no, you don’t have to love everything they do, but when it comes to protecting your…

I vaguely remember someone made a blog post about it and got piled-on. I think it's now fixed or being fixed. Edit: Found it https://ar.al/2024/06/23/fedora-has-been-shipping-with-a-broken-screen…

(OP) To contribute some of my own findings: Some high level infos or ideas on the "small web" or "web 0" can be found on: – https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/ – https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ - https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/ Books I found helpful: - Ship it (Richardson, Gwaltney) - Clean Code (Martin) Aside of that: - I experimented a bit with DDD, but that feels massively oversized (though some of the concepts are useful) - I found Pythons opinionatedness and documentation very helpful in contrast to Javascript, where it is hard to find "a good way" to do things (You see, I like dynamic languages…)

What does the EU instance have to do with any of this? The instance started before there was any talk of anyone buying Twitter. edit: HN won't let me reply, so: -- I had a whole comment written, but you deleted and remade before I posted, and I lost what I wrote. But the gist is, no, the existence of the instance alone has nothing to do with Musk. It could possibly have nudged them to speed up existing plans, but that's not the same as "EU signalling that Elon Musk is bad for the democracy." It's them signaling proprietary social media under the influence of a non-EU power is bad for democracy in the EU. This is one of the possible failure modes they hoped to avoid by exploring alternatives to commercial social media. The conversations are long-running and high-level. For example, from 2019: https://ar.al/2019/11/29/the-future-of-internet-regulation-at-the-euro…

https://ar.al/2020/03/25/apple-just-killed-offline-web-apps-while-purp… He is interested in the protection of user privacy. Author of "Better Blocker", an ad bocker for iOS/macOS.^1 Apple's decisions are making user privacy increasingly more difficult if not impossible when using an Apple computer. 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20211219053624if_/https://better.fyi/

For the rationale behind building site.js, refer to the post "What is the Small Web?" [0] by Aral Balkan. [0] https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/

As predicted - RIP PWAs - https://ar.al/2020/03/25/apple-just-killed-offline-web-apps-while-purp…

Especially when you take a bunch of venture capital: https://ar.al/notes/ello-goodbye/ Note that that was written when they had taken $435,000 in VC, and now they're up to $11M: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ello-inc

Any change requires some hardship. Look here for how to effect that change from a designer/social activist to use linux. https://ar.al/2018/07/16/changes/

Apple has their own problems, but their business is to sell products, not to track you. Google tracks you aggressively and that is their business model. Suggest reading Aral Balkan on this topic [1] [1] - https://ar.al/notes/apple-vs-google-on-privacy-a-tale-of-absolute-comp…

Really like this piece: https://ar.al/notes/the-nature-of-the-self-in-the-digital-age/

I see a lot of people saying they're impressed, admired, etc. at Apple for doing this. It's not about giving props: Apple is not doing this out of goodwill, or because they believe in protecting privacy. Apple has a competitive advantage against Google/Facebook in that its business model does not depend on violating their customer's privacy. They are just exploiting that competitive advantage. Cfr. https://ar.al/notes/apple-vs-google-on-privacy-a-tale-of-absolute-comp…

Has Aral left the UK yet? https://ar.al/notes/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish/

I rather pay for services with money instead of privacy, unless i know my data is being used for a good cause. For example i don't mind sharing my data in a hospital with a university for educational purposes. However, for example, I don't like sharing my data with LinkedIn, who then sells it, makes a huge profit, and even tries to sell the gathered data back to the users themselves in order to get full access to search results. Also this is a good example which explains how people don't seem to value digital privacy equal to "real life privacy" (probably because they don't fully understand?) : https://ar.al/notes/schnail-mail-free-real-mail-for-life/ PS. to all the people downvoting, it's rather childish to downvote, without replying/communicating at all, just because you don't agree with my opinion. If you think facts are wrong then reply something constructive.

> Most of the noise comes from Web technologists don't want to learn anything beyond JavaScript. I agree with a lot of what you wrote, but not this. PWAs are the only path for allowing open publishing of apps that is not gated by a large tech firm. While I completely understand the value proposition of app stores, there are tons of app scenarios held back by them. Two instances are small web[0] and situated software[1] as app stores keep people from publishing apps meant for small audiences by their very definition. Both of these fall under your desire to maximize the user experience. Furthermore, PWAs are the closest thing we have to a “universal” platform. Personally, if I could write an app that worked on all mobile devices and the web in COBOL, I’d be thrilled to write “PROCEDURE DIVISION” every day. The web is a mess because it is open. The web can be scammy because some people are scammy. Restricting PWAs doesn’t mitigate scamminess - it just restricts openness. [0] https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/ [1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situatedsoftwa…

Not well. I'm optimistic about the web in general, but I consider good, reliable clientside storage to still be an unsolved problem, at least for the moment. Some of the things we're still missing: - the ability to easily share data between domains without opening yourself up to massive security risks. - the ability to share data with native apps. - the ability to move data between browsers without syncing it to an online account. - the ability for normal users to inspect offline data. - the ability to trust that browsers like Safari won't just arbitrarily delete your data one day.[0] - the ability to trust that browser upgrades won't ever corrupt the data you have stored.[1] - the ability to share large amounts of data without worrying about storage limits (this matters a lot if you're making an editor like Atom or Visual Studio). Typically, what I see with offline apps is that they'll use offline storage, but they don't trust it. They use it when possible as a progressive enhancement, but then they have to sync that data to a server someplace if it's something that users actually care about. And that matches my experiences as a web developer as well. I can't imagine building something like a password manager or text editor in-browser that was only storing data locally, I wouldn't trust that. It's also not just a technological problem, it's a problem of UX. If I tried to make a purely offline web app, I'd be getting angry customer calls in a week asking where…

Google is your friend: https://benhoyt.com/writings/the-small-web-is-beautiful/ https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/ https://blog.kagi.com/small-web Another related term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IndieWeb see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) (NOT web, but similar in spirit - an extended "Gopher"-like protocol)