Using The Web instead of social media -- a guide

Inspiration

Largely, me and my teammate have both griped about our issues with social media in the past. I've done a lot of thinking about what it is about social media that has annoyed me, and what I could do personally to try to alleviate those problems. As a hacker and programmer, I've often tried to consider what a better system might look like -- perhaps the tools don't exist yet, but they could be built by me?

This was the line of questioning and curiosity that led to this result.

What it does

What we created was a guide, and some examples of what you might make with that guide. The guide is a blog post on my website (the website existed prior to the Hackathon, but the post itself is new of course). The guide details the ways that non-technical users can secure a place for themselves on the Web without ever needing to learn HTML or coding, and really without needing to do anything remotely hard whatsoever.

How we built it

For the main guide, I wrote it out in markdown format, before processing it into Eleventy (a static site generator) to create the blog page. The site itself is hosted using Github Pages. The two example blogs were both hosted on Bear Blog, and simply typed into the web editor provided for the blog. Further details are described within the guide.

Challenges we ran into

We had to brainstorm some ideas for how a non-technical user might be able to solve some of the problems typical when trying to host something like a blog or website. Another difficulty was the kind of non-traditional nature of our project. We wanted to provide a kind of tool that lets non-technical folks have their own site on the web WITHOUT needing to even so much as look at HTML code.

We had considered programming some kind of site builder, but felt that was outside of our capacity for a 48 hour challenge. Instead, we opted for a guide. Anybody who isn't very good at computers can simply look at the guide and immediately receive the utility of it in the form of understanding.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to flesh out several details about how a user might be able use a blog in a particular way that emulates what most people seek to get out of social media, rather than trying to emulate what it seems like blogs are supposed to be like. We wanted to conceptualize a style that broke from the mold that many people are familiar with, and I feel like we did that successfully.

What we learned

Honestly, I would say that the biggest thing we learned is how easy it can be to do some pretty cool stuff online if only you know what to do. The steps themselves aren't difficult to replicate. The hard part is knowing that you can even do such a thing.

What's next for 'Using The Web instead of social media -- a guide'

I feel as though there are several finer details that were left out of the guide, somewhat to keep it minimal, although some of it was done as a result of time crunch. I would like to make a follow up post going into more detail on these ideas. One thing I want to discuss is how RSS can be used to greatly enhance your experience as a consumer of the internet. Luckily, nearly every blogging service automatically generates an RSS feed for you without needing you to enable it, so not knowing about it is no detriment to consumers of your content.

I would also like to go into more detail on why a person might want to switch to the Web, instead of some other tool, like ActivityPub.

Built With

• bear-blog
• eleventy
• github
• markdown