Indie Hosters founders Michiel de Jong and Pierre Ozoux. Indie Hosters
Google and Facebook don’t just run your email and your social network. So often, they’re a core part of your online identity. They help you log in to countless other services across the net.
This is a handy thing. You don’t have to remember as many usernames and passwords, but it’s also dangerous. You’re putting all your eggs in one basket. What if your Google account gets hacked or suspended? Not only would you lose your email address and potentially everything tied to it, but you’d lose access all those other internet services too. And then there are the privacy issues — you can’t control how the data these companies gather about you is used.
A new group called Indie Hosters wants change this. They want to give you a web identity that you have complete control over—and they want to make it just as easy as signing up for Facebook.
The idea behind Indie Hosters is to create a network of web hosts that use a set of common standards, take care of geeky technical details of maintaining your identity, and, crucially, make it dead simple to move from one Indie Hosting provider to another with no hassle. Each host will be an independent business, and you, not the host, will own and control your identity. Through these hosts, you can not only log in to a wide range of other websites, but also published your own stuff to the web.
So far, there are only two members of the network, the project’s founders Michiel de Jong and Pierre Ozoux. But they hope more hosts will join them, and today, the team launched a crowdfunding campaign to work on building the tools and network to make that happen.
Indie Hosters is part of what’s called the indie web movement, a loose knit bunch of programmers, designers, and activists who think you should own your own web content and online identity. For the past few years, indie webbers have advocated that everyone register their own domain name and use it to create your own email address and universal login system.
The New Alternative
There are plenty of alternatives to Google and Facebook’s universal login that you can run from your own website, such as Mozilla Persona and OpenID. The problem has always been that setting up a server to run all this stuff is too technical for the average user. Indie Hosters tries to solve this by setting all this up for you on a server managed by someone who understands all this technical stuff, but who won’t lock you in.
Most web hosts already offer some sort of “one-click” installer to help you setup popular tools like WordPress. But Indie Hosters is trying to take this a step further by automating absolutely everything you need to manage your identity online.
Instead of confusing users by making core features optional, all accounts will come with both a your own top-level domain, custom email forwarding based on that domain, and a TLS certificate—the same standard that banks and retailers use to protect your credit card transactions online. And web identity software such as OpenID and Mozilla Persona will soon work right out of the box.
At the same time, Indie Hosters will let you publish and build your own stuff on the web. At the moment, it offers only two publishing tools to start: the popular blogging system WordPress and a new, social-media-aware tool called Known. But de Jong says Indie Hosters will offer far more applications in coming months, ranging from personal cloud storage systems like OwnCloud to the Bitcoin-style application development system Ethereum.
Traditional hosting services don’t usually add new apps to their one-click installer packages until they’ve become popular. That creates a paradox for new applications looking to gain traction among the non-geek set. de Jong hopes Indie Hosters can give these new applications a better chance of succeeding.
The Beauty of Open Source
De Jong and Ozoux aren’t the only ones trying to make running a personal web server easier. The creators of Indie Box and Freedom Box hope to sell you a physical server that you can run from home, so that you don’t have to trust any cloud provider. Meanwhile, Sandstorm, managed by ex-Googler Kenton Varda, is aiming to create a brand new open source web hosting platform that makes it far easier to manage servers in the cloud.
Indie Hosters is focused on helping you own your identity, while Sandstorm is more about getting applications up and running quickly. To sign-up for Sandstorm, you need to use either a Google Account or GitHub account. Varda says that will change eventually, but the two projects clearly have different priorities. While Sandstorm is trying to build a new platform that makes managing servers much easier, de Jong says that he and Ozoux are trying to avoid writing any new software at all. Instead, they’re trying to use the best software already available and writing automation scripts to manage everything.
Varda says that although Sandstorm has more apps available on its platform now, the Indie Hosters approach will probably enable them to add new apps more quickly than Sandstorm can, since most apps need to be tweaked to run on Sandstorm. “In the long run Sandstorm will offer a more transformative change in the way we run servers,” Varda says.
But the beauty of open source is that Indie Hosters can use Sandstorm’s tools to improve its own offering. Then everybody wins.
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