A lil web farm

Hi, my name is Jacob and this server is the home of my web farm.

Here I host wordways.us, thehbarchive.org, jamiestaeben.com, and ginandfi.com

I'm currently helping my friend Quartz develop a personal site. Its beginnings can be found here.

The future of this platform

I've been dreaming a lot recently about how I could create a small, intentional community of people who:

Beyond my personal site, the other webdev projects I work on are for my friends. Over the years people I'm close to have approached me for help building personal sites, and it's something I've become more comfortable doing. Often these are relatively tech-savvy friends who just don't want to admin their own server. I help them set up ssh-key authentication, a git repository that pushes straight out onto their site, and away they go.

This community would draw inspiration from the tildeverse, in particular tilde.town. These are *nix servers with each user having an account on the server. Users can login to the server using ssh to edit personal sites, talk to other users using wall, etc.

Another place I've been drawing inspiration from a lot recently is the IndieWeb. People who are "in" the IndieWeb post content to their sites in ways that make those sites interoperable with IndieWeb sites. Using compatible standards, independent bloggers / content creators can cite, reply to, and follow each other without using a centralized system.

You can probably see where I'm going with this: I want to build and run a server that does all of these things. Users would sign up for an account, and receive the following things:

The server would come pre-loaded with the following IndieWeb services:

I expect I'd have a lot of users who would want some type of support. Here are some examples of things they might want:

I really want to meet all of these needs, and would do so by building a community that could all benefit from improvements to the same server. I'd work hard to make it a welcoming space, and make it easy for you to export your data and leave. But if you want something entirely custom I could build it for you!

I'm obsessed with this idea because I think it tows the line between an exciting/experimental community based on fun/trust/love, and a deliberate contribution to a more thoughtful, person-centered internet. I know this isn't the kind of service the average grandma would sign up for, but I do think there are people who would be interested, for example:

There are so many other aspects to this project I have yet to hammer out. After this idea has percolated a bit longer I'll draw up a roadmap for its development. For example, I'd want a code of conduct for the community, and a way for others to join me as a maintainer (potentially getting paid). I find it exciting that this project should scale smoothly, and with more interest will come more outside support. If you would like to join me on this adventure, email me.

Love,