I read a bunch of posts around personal websites and how to make it easier to make one, and this is my attempt at consolidating my thoughts around it. There was one common theme in the posts: the existing tools to create one’s own site (mainly referring to static site generators and self-hosting) are too developer-focused. Things that developers can do may be too much of a barrier for non-developers who just to write.
From the posts, there were two solutions that resonated with me. One is encouraging developers to create simpler tools, which Giles mentions in Let’s make the indie web easier:
We need more self-hosted platforms for personal publishing that aren’t Wordpress. And don’t point me to Hugo or Netlify or Eleventy or all those things - all of them are great, but none of them are simple enough. We need web publishing tools that do not require users to open the Terminal at all. And we need lots of them.
We need a whole galaxy of options.
So that next time we say to someone: “You should own your own domain, and publish on your own website,” and they answer with “How?”, we can give an answer that’s more than just: “Install Wordpress.”
Versions of this approach do exist with tools like Bearblog and Pika. Manuel has a list of blogging platforms on his website which lists more such platforms.
The other solution is encouraging developers to form groups that help people host sites using existing tools. Leon mentions this in Better tech won’t make joining the indieweb easier, but collectives could:
So, a starting point for collective blogging is a pool of folk with a range of skills to set up websites. […]
Perhaps this is one area where tech will help. We could use simple, cheap tech stacks with a few options – LAMP, WordPress and a set of robust themes seems an appropriate approach. But having established this foundation, we might be able to make the indieweb a more diverse place, where non-tech folk find it easier to publish their work.
This idea appeals to me a lot more, as I am more interested in hosting an existing tool rather than building a blogging platform from scratch in addition to figuring out hosting. The Fediverse does this well with Mastodon, and I think there is scope for a Mastodon equivalent for long-form blogging.
I haven’t used Wordpress personally1, but a quick search brought up Wordpress Multisite, the ability to host multiple sites on the same instance. So there might be some potential there. The ideal, however, would be a tool that is open-source. Think a hybrid of Wordpress and Bearblog with multiple instances alongside the hosted instance, with built-in support for IndieWeb protocols so that they can interact with each other.
If someone is interested in building on this idea further or if you have other thoughts, please reach out. I’d like to hear from you.