There's negative curiosity involved in trying to reinvent the mid-90s web, but worse.

It's tragic that "your own domain and your own hand-written HTML" has somehow become a glorious ideal, and not a catastrophic failure of the modern imagination.

No one who is truly content-first and not tech-first is remotely (ha...) interested in any of this.

What content-first people want is a drop-in one-click package that sets up a server, secures it and keeps it secure, and installs something like Wordpress, but federated.

And is generally simpler, easier to set up, easier to use, and better.

And prettier.

(Email would be nice too, but we can't have nice things since the oligopolists locked that down with "spam filtering" of itty bitty private domains.)

Pick from a few themes, post, read, interact, leave the customisation and under-the-hood features until later, if you get around to it all.

That's it. That's a what will create a true content-first indienet.

Anything else is just FOSS tinkering for the sake of tinkering, not a credible attempt to create an open platform.

> The field of software engineering is dominated by the smart people that do something not because they have to but out of curiosity.

Emphasis mine.

We wish. I think the state of tech pretty conclusively demonstrates those people aren’t the ones who dominate. Money and power hungry tech bros do, which is why everything is shit and exploitative.