These are great, but what's the solution for those who don't even know what HTML is? They are the vast majority of FB users.

I don't think anyone who taken web development a bit seriously have any problem to publish something online independently.

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.

You can see some of the sites created with it here: http://showcase.onuniverse.com

Here's more about us: http://fastcompany.com/90174165/the-future-of-web-design-doe...

Wow, this is great, I'll give it a try. I love the artistic touch too.

You basically made a CMS and web designer app for the web on mobile, which is 90% with the users, this is a wonderful concept.

Is this the new Tumblr? :)

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?

WordPress recently introduced a new editor, Gutenberg - that is certainly a point and click experience, no HTML involved.

One can get Microsoft Office or LibreOffice and export to HTML.

Or write a text file and upload it with SFTP.

On the other hand, HTML is really not that hard, and a bit of sweat put into your creation is not bad either in my personal opinion: https://petermolnar.net/internet-emotional-core/

You don't need to know HTML to make a Web site with a CMS like WordPress.

Also:

- Decentralized YouTube (1M+ monthly visitors) https://d.tube/

- P2P Reddit (260K+ monthly visitors) https://notabug.io/

Both built with GUN :)

For non-technical people who have some interest in learning html / css and a free weekend, its even easier:

- https://www.codecademy.com/learn/make-a-website

- host for free on netlify

- 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.

This is great, thanks. Also have the below:

- https://gohugo.io/ Static site generator written with Go-lang - https://jekyllrb.com/ static site generator written with Ruby

https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted - list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted locally

I'd like to plug https://circles.app/

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?

Another good code set to build off of http://freedomcontroller.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws....

Doesn't https://about.me (et al) fit on this list too?