2016/Indiehosting
Accessible Indie Hosting Beyond Shared Hosts (#indiehosting) was a session at IndieWeb Summit 2016.
Archived from notes: http://etherpad.indiewebcamp.com/hosting
Benwerd intro: We've got all these great services, super easy SSL
But shared hosting is stuck 15 years ago
What are the problems, what can we do?
Cassie: I use DigitalOcean, give a shoutout to the instant install apps for ease-of-use. I've done it from the ground up, it's doable for me.
William: my website is on DO as well, a friend installed it for me - Q: would you rather build it yourself, or have someone else build it? - A: it's just too difficult to build and manage a server it as a blind person; would rather have someone else do it - Q: are any of the silos good for blind people? - A: LinkedIn is particularly bad. (agreement from everyone)
- Screenreaders are incredibly expensive -- $900, small market - So most people use Apple products, built in
Benwerd: Thinking about how Apple have streamlined real app interfaces may be the way to go, for us to make our interfaces more accessible
- we think Aaron is maybe working on an app version of Quill
William: it cannot just be on a phone, the phone is impossible to use
Benwerd: anything you share from platform to platform or person to person should really be on the web, but we shouldn't be so dogmatic about apps
William: I cannot possibly interact in IRC, the screenreader is going to read forever, I have no idea where things I say go
Benwerd: a really busy chatroom, like on TWiT's IRC, you cannot even read everything if you're not blind, have to scan things ... screenreader is not smart enough
JimP: as a web developer I should probably try to view my sites in a screenreader
William: I understand developers have limited time and bandwidth for building, but think about what improving accessibility will do for the rest of your code
JimP: I've heard it said GoogleBot is the largest blind user
Benwerd: scratch your own itch breaks down sometimes when we need to build more accessible things.
Cassie: talking about security, one of our big things is finding stuff that my parents can use ... I can tell my mom to install Signal, but forget PGP
Ben: start thinking about apps... apps for managing hosting, apps for installing the apps(?), in the context of decentralized/open spaces
Jim: UX vs. DX (user exp, developer exp) .. Indieweb, we're expecting people to do developer stuff
Heroku is nice, they have changed ther free tier again recently so you can run little services 24 hours for free again ... still requires developers .. but we don't want everyone to focus on Heroku
Jim: maybe we should have community managed co-operative hosting, where you have friends give you space on their server
Ben: I think it's important that people be able to make money off of this indieweb stuff, doesn't need to be free ... that's why it would be useful to have an app that lets me install wordpress
Kyle: I wonder if we can use Jim's approach, have a community managed, shared server split between a bunch of people. do it manually and automate the pain points to work toward accessible hosting - but is anyone excited to be a sysadmin?
Gregor: Bear.
Jim: it needs to be configured securely and with spam filtering and management out of the box
Ben: it has to be super simple, super easy
Jim: installing Wordpress on Linux is already too hard
how do heroku, google cloud, amazon look?