We really need to move towards self-hosted content, self-hosted social media, etc, instead of surrendering ourselves to arbitrarily-run walled gardens.

This is hard for non-technical people and I want to hear what they have to say. The only thing I like about twitter/facebook/medium/etc. is that I get to see what the whole world would do if they knew how to `vim index.html`.

In this case, it's even harder because it's about maintaining a website synchronized with a mailing list.

Make something open source and ad-free and they'd all run to it, I'm sure.

> This is hard for non-technical people and I want to hear what they have to say.

I agree, so maybe we should work towards making it easier for them.

I was thinking about spending my Christmas break fixing Friendica bugs, but now I'm suddenly thinking about building my own ActivityPub blogging platform (though no doubt one already exists). But of course that's not going to be enough; it needs to be trivial to deploy and host, at little cost. I believe many cloud hosting providers have a free tier. Would be nice if something like this could be easily deployed there. Create a tool that sets the whole thing up, handles the DNS name, the payments, and deploys the site.

In fact, it would be nice if ISPs offered something like that for free with your internet connection, to finally do justice to that 'S' in their name.

Just make a service that easily ports (or reverse proxies) content from Medium and Substack into a static site hosted on Netlify for free with a custom domain.

Users can continue authoring on those platforms but can begin promoting their own-domain version and gradually move their users off.

That used to be a thing they offered. A dial-up or DSL connection and like 25MB of web-hosting.

That's true. In fact, I recently got an email from mine asking if I still wanted to keep my webhosting, because they wanted to get rid of it. I used to have a lot of stuff there, but it got deleted when they mixed something up about my account.

Some of them still do. In France, Orange hosts a free 6Gb static website if you're a client; Free offers 10Gb. I dunno about the other isp

Although that wasn’t much better for longevity than Medium or the like.

So much early web lost from URLs like http://www.myisp.net/~username/

Please avoid building another platform. Odds are there is something that is close that needs a lot of help.

I know sometimes there is a project that looks good but the maintainers are impossible to get along with. Thus there is sometimes a need to start over. Most of the time though what platforms need is more people to help out: fix bugs, write documentation, translate the UI, run UX tests. That is all the thankless unseen when it works work that makes good commercial projects more polished than most open source projects.

Sounds like a vote to stick with my promise to help Friendica. I've got to admit my main issue with it is that it's in PHP. A lot of these platforms seem to be, and I'd rather work on something in, for example, Svelte+Node.js or something.

I don't know much about that space, but there is probably something written in language better than php. Good luck finding it

For an awful lot of people Substack is that place where crackpots, anti-vaxers and nazis post their inane ramblings. Always worth bearing in mind whether you want to align yourself with that.

You could say the same of Medium, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and everywhere else people post content that’s wrong/politically unpalatable.

I've never met a normal or relatively normal person who viewed Substack that way. Most people have the knowledge to separate a handful of blogs from the way a site runs.

"Crackpots often use modern communications mediums to publish their insane ramblings"

You would prefer a centralized and curated old-school publishing mechanism.

> Why move from one corporate entity to another? Substack will end up going down the same road in time. Get your own domain, fire up a CMS and start publishing on something you control and own.

It's quite weird to see people fawning over the latest startup blogging platforms in 2022.

While people have been migrating to/from medium and substack, wordpress.com has been here the whole time, and it's still quite OK. The killer feature it has, of course, is that because it is open source you can export your data and run it yourself should things go sour (or if you just outgrow it).

Whatever features substack/medium/whatever closed source platform may have that you think you really need, the anti-feature of lockin is not worth it.