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Always Own Your Platform

alwaysownyourplatform.com

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141–150 of 222 posts

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#141

Post by jwr »

ender7 wrote: post #125

Also, unavailable to most people. Yes, I suppose it was kind of nice when the internet was only available to the tech-savvy, to those who didn't mind maintaining a second job as a Unix administrator. But for people who just wanted to _write_, it was not welcoming. Yes, you can go to wordpress.com and sign up for your own blog, but then you're just on the wordpress platform, and subject to their whims. If your plan wo…

I think the problem is not with being tech-savvy but with not wanting to spend anything. It isn't difficult to create a ready-made self-maintaining decentralized publishing tool in the form of a VPS image that people could run. But then people would need to pay for hosting the VPS (single dollars per month) and probably for the software, so that somebody maintains it (also single dollars per month).

I think people are too cheap for that and will rather throw their work into one of the black holes (like facebook), than pony up those dollars.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#142

Post by vkou »

ender7 wrote: post #125

Also, unavailable to most people. Yes, I suppose it was kind of nice when the internet was only available to the tech-savvy, to those who didn't mind maintaining a second job as a Unix administrator. But for people who just wanted to _write_, it was not welcoming. Yes, you can go to wordpress.com and sign up for your own blog, but then you're just on the wordpress platform, and subject to their whims. If your plan wo…

> The tech ceiling was _always_ too high, and it was our own hubris that we weren't willing to build a more welcoming environment.

Building a more welcoming environment is a mountain of work, and most people would prefer to get paid for it.

And monetizing your work becomes a lot easier when you are a company selling an end-to-end product, then when you're a lone dev working off donations.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#143

Post by vkou »

anderspitman wrote: post #139
tcfunk wrote: post #121

If you ask me, we're already past the point of this being effective. Coming from the perspective of creating and selling a PC game, do you really think you can be successful by posting it up on your website with a Stripe checkout button? (Actually you shouldn't even be using Stripe, but I digress). If you do, you're fooling yourself. I think the same could be extended to a number of industries, e.g crafts that are so…

I think the spirit of the post is going ahead and host your PC game on steam or whatever platform you want, but also host it on your own site so you're not completely beholden to a third party.

When you have no way of turning more then single-digit percentages of your Steam sales into your-channel sales, the difference between 'completely beholden' and 'not completely beholden' is academic.

Can you handle a loss of 90% of your income? If not, it doesn't really matter that you have a side gig mowing lawns, in addition to your day job.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#144

Post by amelius »

ender7 wrote: post #125

Also, unavailable to most people. Yes, I suppose it was kind of nice when the internet was only available to the tech-savvy, to those who didn't mind maintaining a second job as a Unix administrator. But for people who just wanted to _write_, it was not welcoming. Yes, you can go to wordpress.com and sign up for your own blog, but then you're just on the wordpress platform, and subject to their whims. If your plan wo…

The problem these platforms solve is more discoverability than it is actual hosting.

A blog hosted somewhere on some user-owned server is not going to be easily discovered.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#145

Post by tonystubblebine »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #105
jaabe wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a medium account? Because I don’t, and I don’t think anyone in my network does either. I can see why you would use YouTube, videos aren’t easy to self host, but I’m really not sure why anyone would chose medium above self-hosting or even using github pages. But maybe I’m just special, and maybe everyone else has a medium account?

The old deal on Medium was that you could host content there and they would then promote your article across their network. Often that promotion could bring thousands or tens of thousands of readers (I've run a pub there for four years and I'm basing the numbers on that). Then Medium switched to focusing on a subscription service which also came with a divide between articles that are inside the subscription service…

Oh, I forgot one of the most important changes in the deal. If you want to post inside the subscription service you can't include Calls to Action (with some exceptions). That's a huge cost for a lot of authors who are only writing in order to promote other things or collect email address. It's generally been a good deal for readers though, who are seeing less marketing pieces in their feeds.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#146

Post by okaleniuk »

anderspitman wrote: post #136
okaleniuk wrote: post #21

I already do. https://wordsandbuttons.online/ is just a static script-maintainable stand alone site. It has no 3rd-party platform but the web hosting. Moreover, I own the domain and don't really rely on anything provider-specific. I can migrate it any day and users wouldn't notice a thing. I also use GitHub to host sources https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons but it's just a convenience not a necessity. The wh…

I took a similar path with my personal site. I did get to the point though where I didn't want to duplicate things like my site banner across all my pages, so I ended up writing a very barebones site generator[0] for compiling handlebars templates. [0] https://github.com/anderspitman/assg

This is sure a way to go too.

I prefer scripts to do monkey job for me instead of templates. They take html as input and produce html as output. It's trivial text processing. But this way every text pattern, even that I would have never thought of beforehand, may become a 'template' in the future.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#147

Post by tonystubblebine »

michaelmior wrote: post #41

I agree with the advice although you can often make use of platforms without sacrificing too much in terms of SEO. For example, Medium and dev.to both allow you to import blog posts from your own site and they set the canonical URL to the original post hosted wherever you want.

Also, I imagine that Medium will eventually switch their payment terms to reward SEO and that might be a good deal for some people.

I just made an offer for someone's back catalog that was based on $7 CPM for their SEO traffic plus whatever they would have made in Medium's performance program. I think it would have worked out to about $12 CPM on what they would have gotten on their own.

That's probably not the peak CPM they could get if they went their own way. But it's not a bad deal given that they don't have to do any work besides just write.

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#148

Post by llao »

bdcravens wrote: post #128
llao wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A blog typically comes with a comment function. That's something dynamic which requires lookup in some sort of database. Your page is purely static and does not even have pagination between posts. Hosting that is trivial and nothing to boast about. Your comparison is really unfair and needlessly nasty.

If you're doing a database lookup for every page load for comments, you're doing something wrong. Also, you'll be moderating comments, unless you want your blog to become a cesspool of hatred or spam, so the page becomes even less dynamic. Myself, I'd put the comments on a separate resource so that the static page would never be affected by that load, whether POSTing or GETing, and load async. (so your static site is…

You are not doing something wrong, you are simply not designing for high-load. Loading things dynamically on every request is perfectly fine for almost any blog.

Moderation is offtopic. Putting comments on a different system seems like overzealous, premature optimisation...

Re: Always Own Your Platform

#150

Post by llao »

PeterisP wrote: post #96
llao wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A blog typically comes with a comment function. That's something dynamic which requires lookup in some sort of database. Your page is purely static and does not even have pagination between posts. Hosting that is trivial and nothing to boast about. Your comparison is really unfair and needlessly nasty.

A comment function doesn't necessarily require a database lookup for every request, you can cache the blog page for a second or two so that it doesn't collapse when getting a hundred requests per second.

Yes and that makes things magnitudes more complex than just serving a static HTML page.
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