Making something as easy as possible to try demonstrates why you need to pay a penny? I don't follow.

Yes, exactly. Because if you’d paid that penny for a server on the regular internet you would just link to the real site

I just happen to not self-host my own code base. But your acting like I paid a penny for that, and self hosting git isn't possible, and we aren't on a forum which exists on the commercial internet.

What a silly deflection. The point is obvious: if it is as trivial as you are saying, why aren't you self-hosting?

I am? Just not my codebase lol. I don't see why the two ideas need conflated.

It's a classic "Show, don't tell" example.

If you want to make the point that self-hosting is trivial, then show a site that you are hosting with your setup instead of just pointing to gitlab.

Ok, well here is an example of how easy it would be to set up your own torum for instance. 3 or 4 commands and it's up.

https://nonogra.ph/running-a-website-inside-a-website-07-15-...

I don't feel the need or want to share my services with the world to demonstrate that.

Why did you still not post an onion link? It's as if you feel people don't like onion links. Which is true, and it's why people don't post onion links.

Does it not demonstrate the trivialness of it which was the case I'm making?

I simply do not want to announce my address here, it's ancillary to the discussion...you shed a layer of security by deciding to make your address public, non of which would benefit the whole point of any of the services I linked.

Circling back to the main discussion of indie web, tor is a great alternative if your circle of visitors is of reasonable size and you want a place outside of the commercialized internet. It's available to anyone.

Paying the penny will certainly give you robustness and reliability...but honestly that's part of the fun of indie web.

It demonstrates that you don't actually believe onion links are viable.

GP said:

>you shed a layer of security by deciding to make your address public, non of which would benefit the whole point

It's possible to host something with no intention of making it internet-public. I also have services like that, that I only use myself or with friends. GP argument is that they don't want to share the onion link to their website, because (bluntly) we are not invited. Onion domains are actually relatively private (i mean unguessable - unlike clearnet domains), so it's possible to host private websites without any additional authorization.

Having said that, onion links carry a implicit baggage, so while I think they're great for sharing things with (technical) friends or a private VPN, they're probably not the best way to host services intended for public.

> It's possible to host something with no intention of making it internet-public.

But this is completely opposite of what most people hosting pages online are doing. Ask a thousand people why they are using Github pages, or Vercel, or netlify... how many of them are not looking for a cheap/free way to have something in the public internet?

Yes, it is, but why or what for?

Perhaps. Perhaps not…

A source repo link often gets more traction here than a link to what might turn out to be a closed, probably subscription based, service. The repo's main readme likely links direct to the product/ service/other main location [if the forge isn't being used as that] or demo location [if a public demo instance exists] should that be where I want to go immediately.

Though maybe posting both the repo link and a "live" link would be better still.