[Freedombox-discuss] blogging in the FB (was Re: Roadmap Brainstorming)

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

I may be old fashioned, but I tend to think that blogging is a pretty
important application, especially if it can be done with fine grained access
control - in many respects blogging + access controls + simple RSS
subscription would cover 90% of what people are using walled gardens like
Facebook for.  Add easy photo albums to the mix, and you're 95% of the way
there, feature-wise (network effects and usability do imply feature parity
isn't enough though).

I think that the idea of pushing static files to a remote server, although a
neat idea, is probably unnecessary.

I ran a friends-and-family hosting service for years, hosting a few dozen
blogs, some on Movable Type, some using static files, some using Wordpress,
some home grown... all using inefficient setups without caching or
pre-loading or really any best practices (I was using cgiwrap to run each
person's blog under a separate UID, valuing security over performance), over
a 512Kbit upstream DSL line, using a 1GHz AMD Athlon XP and 512MB of RAM.

And it worked just fine, nobody complained about performance, ever.

Of course, none of us got slashdotted, but let's face it, most personal
sites never, ever see that kind of traffic.  A 512K up-stream DSL line can
serve one 64Kbyte page every single second - 3600 hits per hour.  That's
*lots* of traffic for a blog.  I'd venture that none of us have that many
friends. :-)

Pro bloggers who expect large volumes of traffic from random strangers will
want to rent infrastructure in the cloud anyway.  Their communication is
also by nature impersonal and non-private, so the FreedomBox has little to
offer them.

The FreedomBox has quite a lot to offer people who are blogging for friends
or family about daily life, family, health, children, relationships... all
the little private things we would like to keep close to home, but still
want to talk to our loved ones about.

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
The Beanstalks Project ehf.

Making personal web-pages fly: http://pagekite.net/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/freedombox-discuss/attachments/20110318/bdb8379a/attachment.htm>