Comment by shuntress
1 year ago
It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without extremely deep[0] technical knowledge.
Most people who want to create and share things (which is almost everyone) need someone else to handle the website for them.
Most companies that will handle a website for you do it under condition of implicit exclusivity. Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, etc want their moats to be as large as possible and the content they publish to be as inaccessible (from outside their silo) as possible.
> It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without extremely deep[0] technical knowledge
Counter point possibly. Squarespace and its lookalikes... Old school "php webhosters" generally now have "site builders" that are reasonably decent, hell I can buy a wordpress site pre setup with a theme that is automatically kept up to date for next to nothing, around what I would pay for a filter coffe every month.
For a blog do you really need more?
Being a knowledgeable developer I can spin up 10 such sites using nginx + some html and CSS and spend about 10 minutes every now and then running updates and rebooting for about the same price but for the average user generating your own content has literally become "click these 5 buttons and begin writing"
Squarespace specifically is positioned much more as a "website for your business" than for your personal space online but they do seem accessible enough.
I think you are still overestimating the average user. Is the guy running a pizza shop with pictures of the menu on Facebook going to sit through learning about domain name registration?
He clearly learnt how to use Facebook, no small feat there...
Honestly though someone asked me about developing a website, I pointed them at a local provider and they had a custom domain + email + a template driven website up in literally 5 minutes... They needed to know how to use a credit card and a web browser.
Pretty sure there are similar experiences all over, I can't really speak for other countries to be fair and I am not those places target market. I pay for a VPS and deploy whatever I want on it vs the guy that asked me for a website who doesn't even know what a domain name is.
There are products for both of us.