Someone on Reddit’s self-hosted subreddit posted a link to Sean Blanda’s Always Own Your Platform mini-manifesto,
Stop giving away your work to people who don’t care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms.
Be in charge of the relationship with your audience.
Deliver value and then ask for money. Avoid unnecessary middlemen.
Always. Own. Your platform.
Which is a nice idea in theory, but how realistic is it? The early days of the web were awesome, but things like it also put up barriers to entry to people who lacked the technical skills to host their own platforms.
Fast forward 20 years later and while the price has plummetted, the technical skills to reliably and securely host your own content has dramatically increased. Blanda’s sites are a good example of this–none of them use TLS and are therefore vulnerable to packet sniffing and man-in-the-middle attacks.
I maintain this blog and the server that hosts it both as a way to keep track of the things I find interesting/useful, but also as a way to stay on top of web technologies. For example, I am fascinated by online security issues, and spend a great deal of time reading about that and using this server to test/implement such technologies.
Few people, however, are going to have the ability to stay on top of the changing technical landscape and still have time to write their blogs, etc. (not to mention that I’m certain the site I maintain at WordPress.com is likely far more secure than this site simply because WordPress.com has full-time employees to deal with security issues while I do this in my spare time).
“Always. Own. Your. Platform.” works as a nice slogan, but I don’t think much of it as an action plan beyond the (relatively) small group of people who could do so affordably and securely.
(•_•)
<) )?Always
/ \
\(•_•)
( (> Own
/ \
(•_•)
<) )> Your Platform
/ \