> "Freedom isn't free, and never has been. But it's always been worth striving for."

Surely we ought to be able to recognize this claim as culturally dependent. While the Western tradition has been deeply concerned with the concept of freedom since the Greeks, that does not hold for other cultures which are currently ascendant. If anything, they might see an unfree state as the natural order of things, and "striving for freedom" as a source of social instability which is a net negative.

Of course. Choosing among competing quality metrics is always a subjective matter. There are no objective facts about what is desirable.

I completely agree with you. The thing is, that many people don't know how to care for their freedom in the Internet and don't know how it is being limited or choose to be blind to it, when being told. With their bad choice, they make it worse or ruin it for others, who do care.

Bad choice is very subjective. Running a blog on your own domain & infra costs at least $10.000 per year in time, effort etc. Not everyone is in the position to invest such an amount nor are they capable of doing so. Medium really was a great solution when everyone was able to run own domains with a Medium backend. At that time it seemed that the web was moving forward.

> Running a blog on your own domain & infra costs at least $10.000 per year in time, effort etc.

You mean $10 right? Because that’s about how much I pay for my domain a year and I don’t spend a dime more. I mean, even with Medium you have to take the time to write and format your articles…

Multiply the time you spent on setting up your favorite blog engine by your hourly rate. It's not $10, though likely not $10k, even if you choose self-hosted WordPress.

I think you can get set up with a domain and static site generator and run it through something like GitHub pages in an hour or two. I personally spent a lot of time writing up a bunch of Jekyll templates and Sass because I have strong NIH and want full control over my website, but for those who don't care (presumably which includes those using Medium) you can get up and going with zero ongoing overhead with just the default themes and stuff.

Yeah but it’s still 100x less than the time it takes to write one quality blog post

This guy spends $285 per month on his website and calls himself the smart blogger. Im aware renting a domain is $10 per year. I was talking about the infra to actually produce content with 20% of the convenience of a medium blog. Take the cost of lost opportunities in account and your first year blogging costs $10k.

https://smartblogger.com/blog-budget/

Converting everything you do to monetary terms is not a mindset I recommend having. It might make sense for some decisions, but everything does not have to be about money.

If by the end of the day you feel accomplished and happy about what you have achieved then I would count that as a win.

For a lot of people pushing on 3 buttons to create a facebook page is enormously satisfying and spending any more effort is ridiculous. The open web is disappearing because of the opportunity cost.

That may be true but it's not that much more effort to create a hosted Wordpress site or to create a blog on Blogger. Arguably, those still lock you in a bit more than self-hosting Wordpress with your own domain, but the data is exportable and there is some migration effort associated with moving no matter what you do.

Yes it is. For starters I have no idea what any of these are and I probably need to input my credit card somewhere along the way.

Actually you don't need a credit card for Blogger; it's a free Google service. And while people have beefs with Google as well, Blogger uses pretty much standard HTML if you want to export it.

This is hilarious. "It's a banana, how much could it cost, $10?"

Tangent, but: let's see how your joke ages; I have a sinking feeling bananas may cost more than that in few months.

How many people outside tech do you know with a personal website? Why are the obvious entry barriers so funny to you?

Does your girlfriend know how to make website without your help?

A ton of photograpers, artists, small-time writers, and hobbyists of any kind have sites. Many of them started before Facebook, though.

I know a few with Wixx sites.