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Steven Saus has written a blog post about why you should never rely on social media. In his latest post on the topic he points out that:
[...] If you don’t personally own your website and data, you don’t have a website or data. Quite simply, you cannot rely on someone else for you to have a website, platform, or social media presence.
[...] I now know, in my gut, how fragile my access to the services Google, Facebook, and Twitter supply are.
Because – and I cannot stress this enough – my ban from G+ was due to something I supposedly posted to G+ when I was unable to post to G+. Hell, I still don’t know what got me in trouble in the first place.
Regardless, my trust is broken, and my role as product has been made painfully clear.
G+ is used as the example, but the same principles apply to the other social control media.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by BsAtHome on Sunday April 29 2018, @05:00PM (13 children)
So, if I get this right, I have to go cold turkey and abstain from SN for the rest of my life or make a site myself.
Damn you guys, you have such an addictive platform... Why are you doing this to me? It is so hard to restrain myself reading and commenting. You are wasting all of my spare time!
Well, good, I got that out of my body. Now I feel better and take good care of all my other addictions. Must get the next dopamine kick somewhere on a website, somewhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29 2018, @05:20PM
If you plan on doing more than post silly comments, yes.
If posting silly comments is all you're good for here, then no, by all means stay!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Sunday April 29 2018, @05:29PM (11 children)
That's not a bad reading of the bad advice given.
On the one hand, I was reading a business card yesterday for contact information and the business, "Name Redacted Grant Consulting", listed a "website" of facebook.com/nameredacted and an email address of nameredacted@gmail.com.
Thus, the business in question has no web or email presence at all, and uses the services of others. This business is probably in the target audience of the dire warnings given.
On the other hand, as you point out, this bit of inspired "wisdom":
Is simply arrant nonsense. It is a dead tie for the dumbest thing ever said.
Host my own at home? I rely on someone else, my ISP, who relies on upstream providers. I can be cut off at any time under terms and conditions. For any reason or none.
Rent shared hosting? I rely on someone else named 3ix or 1and1 or webhostingpad etc. I can be cut off at any time under terms and conditions. For any reason or none.
Run a virtual private server? I rely on someone else named hostyourboxhere.com etc. I can be cut off at any time under terms and conditions. For any reason or none.
Co-locate with my own server that I built? I rely on someone called YouCantHostWithoutOurDatacenter.com. I can be cut off at any time under terms and conditions. For any reason or none.
All that's not enough, and so I win the lottery and buy Google, Amazon, and Microsoft outright and host in
theirmy new "cloud" datacenters? I rely on someone else called my internet backbone provider. I can be cut off at any time under terms and conditions, or under peering agreements. For any reason or none.There are other hosting possibilities, but the single thing they all have in common is that they are ways to rely on "someone else" to connect to others.
In short, the Internet is an assembly of peers. Without the "someone else" that he insists that you avoid, there is no internet; there's just your LAN and nobody cares about your LAN, nor probably ever will. And Steven S., while less clueless than before, remains very, very clueless.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 29 2018, @06:02PM (5 children)
But I have a somewhat stronger claim to my domain, and I take backups of my install, so if my hosting service cuts me off for any reason or none, I'd be back in less than a day.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday April 29 2018, @06:44PM (1 child)
Only if, within that day, you agree to host or get Internet service from the "someone else" that he proclaims you must avoid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @03:17AM
The magic of competition is at work in the hosting industry.
Full video and SM services, otoh, are a near monopoly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by KiloByte on Sunday April 29 2018, @08:34PM (2 children)
Well, then why can't I connect to dailystormer.com, dailystormer.net, or same at many other TLDs? (It's somehow alive at .name [dailystormer.name]). And that site is relatively tame as Internet goes.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @08:32PM (1 child)
dailystormer.com doesn't resolve. dailystormer.net is blocked at my university, but leads to a parking page. dailystormer.name doesn't like my browser.
Mr Andrew Anglin from Worthington OH was smart enough to register all three at competing registrar sites. However, I notice he uses javascript code written by a Jew.
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Wednesday May 02 2018, @01:18AM
Yeah, I don't understand these kind of kooks at all.
Like, Nazis followed the teachings of a slav occultist Blavatsky and as a non-aryan race (Germans) kept murdering an aryan one (gypsies). On the other hand, today it's Hitler who's the symbol of evil when all flavours of fascism together haven't killed even one fifth of people killed by flavours of communism. And so on, so on...
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 29 2018, @06:59PM
Well, you just have to win a "few" more lotteries and buy a backbone of your own. No wait, you'll rely on an electricity provider, so you have to buy that, too.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fyngyrz on Sunday April 29 2018, @08:54PM (2 children)
Here's the thing.
If you host your own knowing what you are doing, you have not only your data, but you have the shape of it - the software that's doing the hosting, the exact databases containing that structure it into something useful, the stats, the images, the videos, the gzips, the scripts, etc.
This means if service A shuts you down, even your local ISP, you can pick and move your whole shebang to service B,C,D...Y,Z,AA,AB...ZZZZZZZ in about a day using nothing but a laptop and someone else's connection.
Compare this to keeping your presence only on Flickr or Facebook or G+ or wherever: Even if you have your data, it's neither presentable or all that useful in terms of re-developing a web presence. That will be one long, hard slog.
For myself, I keep my main website out on the net on a big pipe (I'm in rural Montana... this is really my only choice for a relatively busy site.) The host is a generic linux system. I also keep a live backup here on a completely different linux system – the main site goes down, I change the DNS, it's back up, albeit slower, until I can pick another host, which isn't exactly rocket science.
Then it's just a matter of an upload, setup some really basic linux stuff, another DNS change, and off you go, right back to the strip club. Well, that's where I'd go, if we had a strip club. Well, or not. The gene pool is shallow and polluted here. But I digress. :)
I'm not saying this is perfect – obviously Facebook and the like have traffic advantages – but it's a damned sight better than going from site to no site and no easy way to climb back on the horse, after having been someone's product.
I'll be my own product, thanks.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday April 29 2018, @09:22PM
Your comment is brilliant and on-point and illustrates something important.
The advice quoted in TFS and listed right up front in TFA...
...Is not only crap, but crap that mixes up the real issue, which is buried in another bit at the bottom of TFA:
And even *that* ignores that there is a huge difference between hosting your own using an instance located in a "big tech company" datacenter vs. uploading your things to their websites, making you and your data, their property.
While this guy is coming closer to the point, I don't think he sees it fully yet (despite saying in TFA "my trust is broken, and my role as product has been made painfully clear").
Post to G+, Facebook, Twitter, etc. if you want. But realize the difference between that and hosting your own website.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday April 30 2018, @03:01PM
On top of all the excellent reasons you state, I'll add two more:
1. If I run a website on a hosting provider, I pay them directly for the service. When Youtube cuts channel ad revenue, or Facebook or Twitter block some application, or Apple blocks some application from the iOS app store, in almost all cases the company makes more money by screwing the user or partner than they lose. A hosting provider doesn't have any similar financial benefit from screwing some customers, if they just cut off the customers they lose revenue.
2. Something you alluded to but did not explicitly state is that the hosting market has competition. If I don't like AWS I can go to Digital Ocean, or GCE, or Linode, Vultr, Scaleway, even (ha!) Microsoft Azure. The market is loaded with competition. Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are effectively monopolies so when they screw a channel/page/application partner that partner has no alternative available except giving up on whatever it was they were trying to do.
(Score: 2) by jb on Monday April 30 2018, @06:41AM
Nice straw man.
If you host your own at home (or more likely at your office), you'd be silly not to use multiple links to independent upstream ISPs (and if one gets bought by another, be sure to change the one that got acquired).
As I read it, the OP's advice was not so much about relying on nobody at all (which is impossible if one is to remain part of civilsed society), but rather is about not relying on any middle-men (who by definition are unnecessary).
It's not such bad advice, but probably could be put better as the age-old "eliminate all single points of failure".