@LWFlouisa I'm a paid member, unfortunately. And here's why I wish the IndieWeb was more prominent; imagine the amount of responses he'd get had the article been written on his own blog, instead of using a third party service as a courier for it?

@cambridgeport90 It makes me wonder, as I do things mostly at my own blog. In fact I prefer it. You get more style subtleties.

Granted I still need to work on making the blog posts "look pretty." I only really know HTML and CSS, as far as web development.

@cambridgeport90 The only thing really stopping me from completely self-hosting is expense.

@LWFlouisa Cheaper, in the long run when you don't have to pay a hosting company. I don't care that much for my ISP's terms of service. I'll break them in order to host at home until they physically shut me down.

@cambridgeport90 They have a TOS?

@LWFlouisa debateable. I say that because most ISPs flip-flop regarding what they will allow. My friend wants to open port 80, but is afraid it will be blocked on any day.

@cambridgeport90 I often host on my laptop through port 8000, then route it through localtunnel. Problem is, sometimes the computer registers a domain as already used by you, so you have to restart.

@cambridgeport90 That also keeps me from hosting my own Mastodon/Pleroma instance as well. Or Hubzilla, if I can figure out how to install the thing.

@LWFlouisa You could also opt for a port redirect, which is often cheaper than hosting.

@cambridgeport90 What does that entail? I get port forwarding and port redirect confused sometimes.

@LWFlouisa port redirect is when you forward out a nonstandard port, but somehow a third-party service does something to redirect it to 80, but the public hasn't the dangdest that you're using a nonstandard port. If you want to use something other than 80 for HTTP but want the search engines to find you, then you cannot use a nonstandard port without redirection.

@cambridgeport90 I may have to consider a redirect then.

Does port 80 tend to be blocked?

One thing I haven't figured out is how to host a Roguelike game on a website: I program games in Ruby, and short of IDEs, I haven't seen a way to really execute ruby terminal programs in the browser.

@LWFlouisa Whether port 80/443 are blocked, hard to tell; Comcast, at least, has this weird thing sometimes where they will keep it opened for a little while, and then block it for three months, then open it again. No one can make up their minds. drives admins like us nuts.

@cambridgeport90 What I usually do is IPFS when I want to self-host. Then publish the hash to the gateway if I want it to be permanent.

@cambridgeport90 Well and skill to some degree. I can build a website, but server issues are also a big thing.

@LWFlouisa Server issues are fun to fix when they're your issues. Makes you think hard. It's when you have others breathing down your neck to fix it and fix it now that gets to me.

@cambridgeport90 It sounds like a boon if you're a self-publisher.

@LWFlouisa Got that right.