A personal site creation and hosting service / Digital garden
Pravina
Public
Seen by 16
Discussed in the Discord thread - figured we could hash out some details here! This would fill the need currently served (poorly) by social media like Twitter and DeviantArt. A lot of places that currently give people a presence on the web in 2021 are bland, have poor typology for many use cases, and exist mainly to serve corporate / profit-driven interests. Establishing a new platform to allow people to be present on the web and present things (anything!) would be neat.
In practice, I'm envisioning creating something between Squarespace and neocities.org. In terms of user experience / general design paradigm, we could try to make something like the "digital garden" (see https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history) more accessible to the nontechnical person. Perhaps we allow for full customization via source-availability and allowing self-hosting, while providing hosting on our own servers as a paid service.
Jasmin Fri 30 Apr 2021 8:04AM
The idea of a virtual garden sounds really nice! Some things that came to my mind:
For blogs, micro.blog exists. While it sounds nice at first glance, it's expensive tbh. Not for tech people in general, but I follow a lot of people on Twitter that could not afford it. Also blogs "are dead" or simply not longer called "blogs" ^^
-
A pay-what-you-want model would be a good idea for the hosted service. My hosting provider (uberspace.de) does this as well, requiring as less as 1 EUR per month. It's not free, but I think that lowers the entry.
Pravina Fri 30 Apr 2021 10:11PM
Pay-what-you-want seems really nice, keeps things much more accessible - sites like itch.io with that made possible are really admirable.
Distinguishing this idea from a blog also seems important, I agree.
Atrian Wagner Fri 30 Apr 2021 6:07PM
As someone who loves the concept of digital gardens and is building my own using hugo, I am 100% on board with this idea!! I have more thoughts, but I need some time to organize them.
Pravina Fri 30 Apr 2021 10:10PM
Would love to hear your thoughts!
Pravina · Fri 30 Apr 2021 5:17AM
This may or may not overlap with the sex work initiative, as well! It might be worth asking people in that space what would serve their needs.