That said, I think that totally owning your location online is totally worth it.
https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005579728-Custo...
I mean, I was just looking for a quick solution in college so I can't blame myself, but I do want to run back to 18 year old me and kick my heels a bit for creating such a big chunk of technical debt I doubt I'll ever actually fix.
That may not get the result you personally want, but it is completely do-able.
It's http://blog.calebjay.com/ - I forgot I actually have the blog set as a subdomain, not an endpoint. It's been a couple months since I've done anything with it... man, it even still has the bluehost default favicon X(
1. You have much more control about how your words are presented on your own website. Got an interesting idea for a style? Know how to code some neat features for the site? Want to avoid ads or calls to donate or subscribe altogether? Go for it, you've got the power to do just that.
2. You're not under corporate control like you'd be on a 'platform' and can't be as easily bullied off the internet by angry scumbags in a social media lynch mob. Oh sure, it can still happen if you annoy people that much (see, a certain far right website that had trouble finding a host recently), but you're still more protected than on a service that cares only about saving its own reputation.
3. If you don't like the service, you can move elsewhere and keep the same URL, theme and content.
4. All money made via the site goes to you rather than a middleman.
5. And well, it's really closer to what the internet should be in general. We should be supporting people who setup their own sites and ventures, and who don't merely help walled gardens become more popular or dominant online.
Plenty of reasons really.
If you want to do this long-term, get your own domain and distribute your content elsewhere if needed. E.g. on medium you can post articles from your blog and it links back at the bottom if you think Medium is important for your audience, announce posts on Twitter, Facebook, have RSS feeds, ...: bring the information where the users are, but have the central source of it under your control. Pointing the domain at a service is fine, it enables you to move if there are issues.
For Medium I use a custom domain so I still own the URL. And all links to my content are to a URL I own. When I inevitably move to a new service those links will continue to be valid.
I'd like to move off Medium to something pure custom. The inability to embed certain types of rich content is super, super frusrating. Want to embed a gif that doesn't suck? Or a Unity demo? Or an javascript demo? Too bad! You can't!
But it gives me 95% of what I want for free so I won't complain too much.
Technically you make a publication and THAT gets a custom domain. Which is a little weird but overall works. The publication portal looks a million times better and has way more configuration options than a basic user profile.
Here's mine and what it looks like: https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/
I would not have been able to sell one of my blogs if I had used a platform like Medium or Tumblr.
I've also seen someone's blog get deleted on a different hosted platform without warning and no way to recover the deleted content. If you don't control your application, you are at the mercy of another, unknown person's decisions.
I don't like landing on Medium posts. That kind of centralized, fast-food publishing monoculture isn't what the WWW is supposed to be. I don't comment on or "like" anything on Medium either. If it were a relatively small site, it wouldn't be such a problem, but it's becoming inescapable now.
I think that tech culture needs a revamp where people start to focus on DIY freedom again: blogs, websites, OSes, hardware, RSS/Atom (vs. AI feeds), etc.
https://github.com/posativ/isso
or this:
https://blog.webkid.io/moving-from-disqus-to-schnack/
You could also install Discourse on a subdomain (quick docker-based install on a $5/month server) and use that for comments.
*if your site is spammed hard enough, javascript may become necessary, but you can try honeypot fields first in pure HTML.
My blog is quiescent right now (I discovered I'm an essayist rather than a "blogger"), but it goes back to 2000, albeit quite messily from the first platform conversion I did. No platform has been around that long. Goodness knows the platform where it started is long gone and forgotten by almost everyone.
ducks
Ultimately though, I chose to run one on my own for the mere satisfaction of "owning" it. Maybe it's, uhhh, like how buying a house is thought to be a step up compared to renting an apartment? Something like that. There's also that feeling where I feel like I'm only half there if it's under a platform like Medium or Tumblr.
I admit the benefit of being on a network like those are bound to be helpful: if you're looking for them. Eitherway, I thought I could just cross-post things anyway if I ever wanted to.