2016/Indiehosting

 Accessible Indie Hosting Beyond Shared Hosts  (#indiehosting) was a session at IndieWeb Summit 2016.

Archived from notes: http://etherpad.indiewebcamp.com/hosting

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https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/r462dz534jhddp76nsqgubhdzqe

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?