Going to throw our hat in the ring here. We built Universe (http://apple.co/Universe) for precisely this reason: to enable everyone to build their place on the internet, without touching code, all from a phone.
At some point of ease, you pretty much just have MySpace/Facebook.
And that's what I always think about these conversations... What separates hassle-free push button website creation and publishing from MySpace/Facebook?
- maybe simple intro to git to make updating and deploying to netlify easier
anyone can learn basic html / css (in 6th grade we did a week long "build a website" project and everyone did it -- this was back in the late 90s), and with frameworks like bootstrap anyone can make an attractive looking site.
with just basic html / css knowledge and netlify, you can:
- self-host and write a blog
- post photo albums
- share videos and audio (link to youtube)
- share status updates
- create an online course
- create a curated list of interesting articles, photos, recipes, food (a la pinterest)
- conduct surveys (link to google forms or other free survey tools)
- create a mailing list / online following (link to google forms or use mailchimp)
- get creative and personalize your site's appearance
- create links to your friends sites
- publish short stories or even e-books
- communicate with people via email (just create an email address for your site and publish it). posting publicly doesnt have to be the normal way to socialize online
- and probably much more
the only downside is if you don't want everything to be public you'd need a simple backend / auth framework, and youd have to host on heroku or something (idk if netlify only does static sites?)
and if you can do this stuff, and find html / css interesting, it isn't that hard to learn enough python or js to build stuff like forms, comments, like buttons, RSS feeds, or simple CRUD apps
the open source software and free-tier saas products we have today make so much of this so easy
To us this seems very easy and I too have designed my own portfolio webpage for instance, but really do you think my nearly 80-yo grandpa or even my peer and best friend from high school who has those pesky 12-hour nursing shifts between all of her downtime has the ability or more importantly cares to do this? the desire and wherewithal to design a webpage is still a very niche interest.
We are open to opensourcing Circles. What if anyone could start their own Facebook-equivalent site using opensource? What if we could splinter FB into 10,000 sites?
Things to get started with:
- https://www.netlifycms.org/ - completely free static website on top of github pages
- http://mastodon.social/ - federated microblogging, which can be self-hosted as well
- https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/ - one click wordpress for 5$/m
- https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/projects/wordpress/ - another near one-click wordpress for near 5$
- https://yunohost.org/ - easy self-hosting, even on top of a raspberry
- https://indieweb.org/WordPress - make your site communicate with other sites
- https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ - decentralized, sneakernet friendly, private social system