"To run The Simplest Federated Wiki, you’ll need your own web server, which Cunningham thinks is an important part of the project."
Sounded great till that point. He's putting his own nerd centric bias into it. If I'm a history guy, not a tech guy, and I want to "fork", asking me to run my own "server" or whatever is a non-starter.
Exactly, you just need to reduce the friction level to a certain point. Saying it requires it's own web server sounds like a chore, but Mac OS X comes with a web server built in. You could in theory run your own local Wiki. Or someone clever could sell cheap instances powered off Amazon/Google/Heroku/cheap VPS host with a custom web frontend that does the heavy lifting.
TL;DR good companies make life easy for people who want it without hassle.
Since we have free accounts on app engine, heroku etc... and even gdrive or dropbox and so on... wont it be easy for someone to write a simple web app or ipad app or something like that allows the masses to run their own wiki's without being technically sophisticated.
To an end user the process could be as easy as install app from chrome webstore... specify some minimal data... and you have an app engine account hosting your tiny wiki. If tomorrow you choose to move it heroku, it would as simple as a button click and registering on heroku.
I had the exact opposite reaction to that. "But is it too nerdy to catch on? To run The Simplest Federated Wiki, you’ll need your own web server" How is running a web server nerdy? Does this person not realize that wikipedia is also run on a web server, or that most people will be reading this very article online? The Web is one of the biggest things going on right now and certainly one of the fastest-growing. It concerns me that people aren't even taught the basics of running their own servers. How are you supposed to participate in the Web if you don't even have a web server?
"Does this person not realize that wikipedia is also run on a web server."
The difference is that you don't have to run your own server to edit or otherwise participate in Wikipedia. You don't need your own server to have a blog on Tumblr or WordPress.com.
And since Simplest Federated Wiki requires either Ruby/Sinatra or Node.js/Express, you need more than just a shared hosting account to run it, which raises the barrier to entry (though the one-click installer, or PaaS providers, help lower it again).
It may eventually be a non-issue if someone builds a "wordpress.com for federated wikis."
Most people should at least know how to drive a car. Well I guess you could use public transportation and still get a large benefit out of the public highway system. But having your own car lets you do things public transport never will. And it would be ridiculous for someone to claim that learning to drive is too nerdy, even if it is pretty complicated and has a lot of arbitrary rules you have to go to classes to learn.
Most people should at least know how to drive a car.
Why? Sure, it lets you do some things that almost nothing else does, but you can usually work around them, and it imposes a great cost of both time and money. Why should one spend them?
And likewise, learning how to run a web server on the public Internet (as opposed to a toy server on your LAN) requires a huge amount of time and knowledge, in terms of learning how to use the software, secure it, keep it spam-free, keeping up with the updates and security vulnerabilities, configuring DNS, etc. And at the end of the day, it can still be taken down by the hosting/VPS provider or ISP, just like your Wordpress.com blog.
Sounded great till that point. He's putting his own nerd centric bias into it. If I'm a history guy, not a tech guy, and I want to "fork", asking me to run my own "server" or whatever is a non-starter.