2016/Brighton/lightson

 Keeping the lights on  was a session at IndieWebCamp Brighton 2016.

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/lightson

IndieWebCamp Brighton 2016 Session: Keeping the lights on


 * 1) lightson

Brainstorming about sustainable and reliable 'computational infrastructure' for IndieWeb sites

Thinking about users with no 'web skills' and no interest in/time for the technical details involved in using and keep running IndieWeb sites and related infrastructure (handling webmentions, comments, etc.)

Part of the attractiveness of GAFAM platforms and other proprietary platforms/walled gardens is their (overall) reliability, even at the high price of trading privacy for it.

Hosted IndieWeb services (brid.gy, Known, various hosted publishing platforms, etc.) partially help. But what about being entirely independent from external services? Or what to do when a hosted service, even when they allow to easily export personal content and metadata, shut down? Like having access to software source code is of very little direct use to users who cannot inspect or change it, a dump of personal content can be of very limited use to non-tech savvy users.

There are at least two dimensions to 'keeping the lights on':
 * reliable, non-proprietary, easily re-deployable, inspectable, etc. infrastructure (i.e. appropriating at a small, indie scale the benefits of computational management of infrastructure that makes GAFAM&others so efficient at managing things at a huge scale: self-hosted) cloud computing; devops; browser as a (computational) platform; mobile 'general-purpose' computation devices...
 * strategies for peer help - e.g. an IndieWeb 'family champion' able to do lightweight support and maintenance for family members, friends, etc. (i call these 'computational mediators' [1])

Participants

 * hotzeplotz (leading)
 * martijn
 * erik Erskine