There are far too many ways to publish blogs these days. The real pressure it so piggy back on Medium or Substack, the latter having attracted to seriously big names. The problem I have is that everything looks the same. Furthermore, I'm not 100% comfortable with either platform. I'm starting to lean heavily on Ghost and will be building a presence at https://freethinkeratlarge.com. I hope you'll check it out.
@wftl Why a platform - isn't your own domain site all that's neeed!? (ok, with any static och dynamic tool/platform as base; I mean Hugo, Jejyll, Joomla, Drupal, WordPress etc and possibly plugins for additional features) Is it about being more visible?
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@hehemrin @wftl yeah the argument is that these platforms make your work more discoverable and visible. I've had some good results on medium over the years, but overall I'm skeptical. I would love to just have my domain and blog and then be able to push the RSS feeds into various channels to increase readership, but that's not the model currently pushed by the big platforms - for obvious reasons
@johnmark @wftl I like RSS... I restarted to use it last year. For me, who only blog as egotrip/idea sharing/knowledge sharing, I think those who find my content are either when I post an article link on social media or search engine (meta data I set may be important). Push RSS feeds sounds as a good idea - from content owner perspective!
@hehemrin @johnmark I think the mailing list (along with RSS) is a long-forgotten and underappreciated method that we seem to have collectively forgotten in favour of these platforms supposedly doing the work for us. Supposedly promoting our work. My own Wordpress site has been running under marcelgagne.com for years but it's become messy with the years, and there's no mailing list to reach out to people. That's why I'm building a new site with open source tools and Ghost.
@hehemrin @johnmark
Henrik, Ghost is an open source project (MIT license) that offers hosted services, but it's completely open so you can just download and install the code on your own server to do it all yourself. They also make it easy to move from their hosted solution to your own server if you choose to do that later. It's very much like Wordpress, from a business standpoint, but built with node.js instead of PHP.
@wftl @johnmark I understand what you are saying. Adding to drawback list: the content has to meet their requirements, you are not in control of the content (hopefully you still own the content) and conditions may change or service ends (like, I forgot the name, but the one that Twitter acquired and they have/under termination, where eg Substack can be a new alternative).
@hehemrin @johnmark
Well, if you believe them (oh, and it was Twitter that bought Medium, I believe), you do own the content, but they own the way it looks and you effectively become trapped there. As I said, my old site has grown messy, hence the clean, fresh look, with mailing list support this time. For better or worse, I'll probably keep populating the old site, for now, with anything I add the shiny new digs, but it's time to divorce Medium and Substack. Feel free to subscribe. :-)
@hehemrin @johnmark
Oh, I have my own domain, Henrik, and have for years now. This is kind of my point. In a world with so many source begging for attention, there needs to be a way to convince your audience to check you out from time to time. Hard to do without some kind of outreach mechanism (e.g. a mailing list). Medium and Substack both promise to bring eyeballs to you by different means, but typically at a cost, a cost that sometimes comes down to your personal identity.