Yurt is a small house for nomads that is easy to construct and transport.
The YurtPage is a small homepage that you can deploy on your own devices like router, Raspberry Pi, NAS, laptop, PC or even TV. So you don't need to pay for hosting and hardware. Routers are the best because almost everybody have them. They consume small electricity and are always on.
The main goal is to make a self-hosted website as cheap as possible. A typical usage is to have a private family storage of photos, chat or a small blog.
Good news is that you can have this today easily with NAS (Network Attached Storage). These devices was initially intended to have a file garbage at your home. You can insert a lot of disks into it to have enough space and make a fast and reliable storage. Today with SSD disk you can have more than enough space. But it won't be that reliable, and you may lose your data.
To solve this I think to make kind of a "social network" to connect with your family and friends. Your data will be encrypted and stored on their devices. This gives you a backup for free. So the bigger your social network the better it's for everybody. This architecture improves privacy but also makes the internet more distributed and stable with local traffic.
I hope that the Yurt will be already pre-installed on routers so any user can just start using it when needed.
- 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.
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 aren't 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