The best solution is what the Indieweb folks called POSSE: Publish on your Own Site , Syndicate Elsewhere: https://indieweb.org/POSSE For instance, I might publish a clip on my own site first, then mirror it to places like YouTube, TikTok and Reddit so more people find it. Or post an article on my own site first, then repost it on Medium and Substack (with a canonical saying my own version is the original if possible…
Own your work
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Re: Own your work
#12I described the thought process I went through here: https://jmmv.dev/2016/01/medium-experiment-wrapup.html and am currently using Hugo to build my site. Granted, creating content via Markdown is slightly more convoluted than using a web UI, but the feeling of control and future-proofness I get cannot be matched.
Re: Own your work
#13Re: Own your work
#14Re: Own your work
#15love this. started to publish things on my personal site almost 10 years ago http://podviaznikov.com . I changed publishing tools so many times, but all the content still lives on the same domain name and I try to support same URLs.
Re: Own your work
#16Re: Own your work
#17That said, the dumped data is not in a format that can be just uploaded to a different platform, or to my own site. That's not an issue for me, because I can write a little code that will transform the posts exactly how I need them for upload to a different platform, or my own site. When I end up needing to do this, I'll probably add custom styling that will look better than Substack's anyway, particularly in reference to code blocks.
I feel for nontechnical people. How do you decide where to invest your time? What do you do when the platform shifts in a bad direction, or closes entirely? AI tools will probably help a lot of people in this situation, if they were good about maintaining backups in the first place. I imagine "Can you convert my Substack archive to a format that will work on x_new_platform" would probably be a useful prompt.
Re: Own your work
#18This is overstating it. You cannot "own" a domain name. Domains are essentially rented and eventually (whether on purpose or by accident) your domain name will expire.
Re: Own your work
#19What is old is new again This was basically the only option in the early 90s before geocities etc... So most of us who were on the web in the 90s did exactly that. Difference was, when you turned your computer off for the night, your site was down If you were really fancy you had a dedicated T1 line, but those were for rich people only I've been on my own domain for well over a decade and my CI process hasn't changed…
Re: Own your work
#20I own my work, but about 90% of my traffic comes from Google. This is something I try not to think about too much.
If it makes you feel any better, a more significant portion may come from Bing/OpenAI's way soon.