What's needed to make the #indieweb thrive

[scripting]

I've tried to explain this idea many ways over the years. This time I'm going to explain it technically, without any detours or analogies.

1. Call the service WebStor. It's a storage system for the web.

2. There's a website that allows you to browse your files. Upload new ones, delete them, change the attributes of files individually or as groups. It's a lot like the browser interface for Dropbox but it does more than Dropbox does.

3. You can attach a CNAME to any folder, like mycoolblog.org. When a request comes in for mycoolblog.org, WebStor serves the content out of the folder that had the CNAME attribute.

4. There's an API, based on OAuth, that lets blogging tools post to a user's account, possibly limited to a specific folder. That way Mary, an independent developer, could write a blogging tool worked with WebStor. And so could Sue and Megan and Arnold. And because it's OAuth, the user can control which one has access to which folders.

5. The user pays for the service. No advertising. Unless the site gets huge traffic the cost should be at most a few dollars a month.

That's the idea. If we had this then users could own their own space in the web and developers could create tools for the users. Instead of just having a few developers, all of them large, creating silos, a thousand tools could bloom, as could many cloud-based storage services. But we need one to go first.

[calvincorreli]

Sounds pretty straight-forward. And useful. What’s holding us back from implementing it? Any hard bits I’m not seeing? I’m happy to be a part of it.

[scripting]

The best thing to do right now is to help the idea circulate.

[scripting]

Please don't post links to things that are "something like this" -- I'm sure you're trying to help, but you're actually not helping.

[andrewshell]

I've been thinking about this and I'll have to try a proof of concept, but I'm wondering if GitHub with GitHub Pages might be an option.

You could allow people to click on a button to sign in with GitHub, then you select what repos you want the app to have access to.

There is an API, but I'll need to see how to actually read & write to it like a folder. It will probably be a bit more complex than S3 because you'll be dealing with commits.

If you write to the gh-pages branch it's automatically a hosted website. By default, it will be at http://username.github.io/repository but you can put a file named CNAME in it and point to it to host with your own custom domain.

[scripting]

That's a good point Andrew. I think GitHub might have what's needed. Funny how a repo is a lot like a folder (actually it is a folder, on my local hard disk). Dave

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On Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 10:27 AM, Andrew Shell ***@***.***> wrote: I've been thinking about this and I'll have to try a proof of concept, but I'm wondering if GitHub with GitHub Pages might be an option. You could allow people to click on a button to sign in with GitHub, then you select what repos you want the app to have access to. There is an API, but I'll need to see how to actually read & write to it like a folder. It will probably be a bit more complex than S3 because you'll be dealing with commits. If you write to the gh-pages branch it's automatically a hosted website. By default, it will be at http://username.github.io/repository but you can put a file named CNAME in it and point to it to host with your own custom domain <https://help.github.com/articles/using-a-custom-domain-with-github-pages/> . — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#21 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABm9O5IiPCPvmcYCSaie-0B4YZFEc0wgks5sYFlsgaJpZM4O1sm7> .

[andrewshell]

Looks like it will be possible via the Repository Contents API.

[scripting]

I was playing around with this in June.

https://github.com/scripting/githubpub

Dave

[pjz]

How does this idea interact with nodeStorage?

[scripting]

nodeStorage does very little of what I describe here. It's a way to create fractional horsepower silos. ;-)

[xmlgrrl]

Hi. Have y'all taken a look at User-Managed Access (now in draft V2.0), based on OAuth? It sounds very close in concept to this idea, and it's been independently implemented by various parties, including in open source (could always use more). It's "designed to give an individual a unified control point for authorizing who and what can get access to their digital data, content, and services, no matter where all those things live."