I also maintain my own blog. A $10 a month VM on Digital Ocean buys me a server. I have managed to solve the chat problem as well. I have A Synapse Matrix.org server for chat. It's perfect end to end encryption. It's a pain to get people to actually use it but once they do it's actually really reliable and has never failed me once since I've started running it. I use it with my SO and I know that what we say to each other can never ever be spied on by a third party including the pictures and videos we send to each other over the server. The clients on Android, iOS, OS X, and Windows are all actually very good. I use them all. On top of this I run a blog where I wrote the source code myself from the ground up. Framework and all. No normal person is gonna do that.
What we actually need is an application using a subscription based protocol.
We can't have one company have defacto control over pictures, texts, discussions.
I didn't quit Facebook and Instagram because I wanted to stop sharing. I got tired of being spied on. I got tired of the ads. I got tired of random people trying to sell me something. I would much rather people hosted their own photo feed which could be a literal exact clone of the Instagram photos. Host just that and let me subscribe to a standard feed. It should cost literally pennies a year to host your content.
People subscribe to your "feed" by "friending" you. When you see this friend request you set what they can see right there. And you'd be able to run a feed for a group, personal, business, whatever. It would let you publish pictures, events, and discussions. No one can ban you from the platform because it will be ubiquitous like email. You can even put in public/private keys and make it super secure.
This is what we need.
How do you host it?
How do you make it easy to use?
These are the problems we should tackle.
I was thinking a blockchain would be a convenient "free" host. It's just slower than I'd like but for posting events or photos I'd be willing to wait a few minutes.
What we actually need is an application using a subscription based protocol.
We can't have one company have defacto control over pictures, texts, discussions.
I didn't quit Facebook and Instagram because I wanted to stop sharing. I got tired of being spied on. I got tired of the ads. I got tired of random people trying to sell me something. I would much rather people hosted their own photo feed which could be a literal exact clone of the Instagram photos. Host just that and let me subscribe to a standard feed. It should cost literally pennies a year to host your content.
People subscribe to your "feed" by "friending" you. When you see this friend request you set what they can see right there. And you'd be able to run a feed for a group, personal, business, whatever. It would let you publish pictures, events, and discussions. No one can ban you from the platform because it will be ubiquitous like email. You can even put in public/private keys and make it super secure.
This is what we need.
How do you host it? How do you make it easy to use?
These are the problems we should tackle.
I was thinking a blockchain would be a convenient "free" host. It's just slower than I'd like but for posting events or photos I'd be willing to wait a few minutes.