Intro: What is Yurt Page
Yurt is a small house that is easy to construct.
The YurtPage is a small homepage that all people can deploy on their own devices like router, Raspberry Pi, PC or even TV. Mainly routers because almost everybody have them and they consume small electricity and are always on. So you don't need to pay for hosting.
The main goal is to make a self-hosted website as cheap as possible and typical usage is to have a closed family storage of photos or a small blog.
If you have friends with a YurtPage then your data will be encrypted and stored on their devices and this gives you a backup for free. So the bigger your social network the better is for everybody. This architecture improves privacy but also makes the internet more distributed and stable.
- Old Web: peoples just readers of content on sites: news, books, portals like Yahoo or MSN.
- Web2.0: peoples now can create their own content and interact with each others: Wiki, YouTube, Facebook.
- Web3: "decentralized" still nobody knows what it is but all talking about BlockChain, metaverse, NFT and other buzzwords.
I don’t know what Web3 would be based on, but Web4 would be based on HTML and cgi-bin. — Albert Einstein
And that's exactly what Yurt uses :) That's essential technologies that may work on the smallest devices.
Basically for the Yurt the terminology is not applied at all. Security, privacy and censorship resistance are cool. But publicity, accountability and bad content filtering are cool too when used wisely. The main goal is to make a cheap web. Ideally just for free.
- So small businesses can create a cheap site to sell their products without needing to pay to marketplaces.
- So users may have cheap photos storage: just connect an SSD disk to your router.
- So that authors can create and sell their content without needing to share money with platforms because their followers are seeding their content.
If something is better to be centralized like authorization then ok. If something can be better decentralized like content distribution: ok, let's try to do it so. The basic design principle is to make a frugal solution to make it available for mass people.
The end goal is that all users will have a Yurt already installed on their routers and devices when they purchase so they can just start using it.
Even today anybody can create its own site: buy a hosting for about 5$ per month, and also you have to buy some domain, then install WordPress blog engine and configure it. But nobody will ever visit your site. Only occasional visits from Google search. The problems are solved by social network: you see everything that your friends posted in a single place. Domains not needed. And that's for free.
- Similar projects or what do we have today
- Why selfhost
- Hosting and devices
- Disk space
- Connectivity
- Domains and DNS
- HTTP Web Servers
- OpenWrt
- Join discussion in Matrix https://matrix.to/#/#yurtpage:matrix.org
- https://github.com/orgs/yurt-page/projects?type=classic project ideas and issues