Is Self Hosted Blogging Dead?

Currently, IPFS [1] looks most promising to me. It's easy to publish a static website to it [2], and public gateways are available to make the site accessible to readers who do not run their own nodes. While IPNS (the naming system) does not seem to work reliably yet, hash of the current version of the web site can be published in a special DNS TXT record, and if that same domain points to IP address of a public gateway, the web site will be simply accessible via that domain.

[1] https://ipfs.io/ [2] https://github.com/ipfs/examples/tree/master/examples/websit...

Agreed.

I'm not suggesting there ever was and Edenic period where things were easy, but I do think an argument could be made that things have gotten worse for the non-technical beginner looking to host their own site.

First, they've got to make a decision of which publishing platform to install on their site. They'll probably see some online debates, talking about static site generators vs Wordpress, etc. They'll waste a few hours trying to figure out what choice to make. Once that decision is made, it's next time to find and install a better looking theme, because no platform seems capable of looking decent enough out of the box.

Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we've gone backwards.

> the reality is that most people... do not care about high quality publishing or readability

I'd argue the opposite. Empires of platforms have been built around being high quality and easily readable. Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.

And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?

What if you wanted to make a self hosted snapchat type site for your friends to see your photos?

I've made a few unfair points, but I think the general idea remains, the self publishing tools haven't kept up with the rest of technology, in general.

But this isn't apple and oranges; a blog with themes and whatnot is much more sophisticated than the HTML CSS rendering defaults. IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking and you don't really need it. Heck, even a text file written with a little bit of care is perfectly readable.)

And the information overload isn't much of a problem: most people know immediately that static site generators aren't for them.

> Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.

Look at all the blogs using Wordpress, and everything written on Twitter and Facebook.

> And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?

I am not entirely sure what a 'photo site for mobile' is, but I am sure that it has no equivalents from before 2006 or so which you could claim it is harder or more complicated than, and I suspect that you could get 95% of the value from a static HTML page sitting on S3 containing a bunch of tags and a 'viewport' tag that you copy-pasted from a StackOverflow post you found by googling 'how to make a mobile html page'.

I've done some exploration of just where intelligent conversation online lies, and frankly was surprised at the results: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

The methodology uses the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers list as a proxy for "intelligent discussion", the string "this" to detect English-language content, generally, and the arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashian" as a stand-in for antiintellectual content. Google search results counts on site-restricted queries are used to return the amount of matching content per site, with some bash and awk glue to string it all together and parse results.

As expected, Facebook is huge, as is Twitter. When looking at the FP/1000 ratio (hits per 1,000 pages) KK/1000, and FP:KK ratios, more interesting patterns emerge.

Facebook beats G+, largely.

Reddit makes up in quality what it lacks in size, but Metafilter blows it out of the water. Perhaps a sensible user filter helps a lot.

The real shocker though was how much content was on blogging engines, even with a very partial search -- mostly Wordpress and a few other major blogging engine sites. Quite simply, blogs favour long-form content, some of it exceptionally good.

But blogs suck for exposure and engagement.

This screams "Opportunity!!" to me. I've approached several players (G+/Google, Ello) with suggestions they look into this. Ello's @budnitz seems to be thinking along these lines (I'm a fan of what Ello's doing, but its size is minuscule, and mobile platform usability is abysmal.)

One of the most crucial success elements for G+ is the default "subscribe to all subsequent activity on this post" aspect. Well, that and the ability to block fuckwits (though quite honestly ignore would be more than sufficient). There's a hell of a lot else to dislike, but those two elements are crucial to engagement.

As for blogging, I'm a fan of a minimal design (http://codepen.io/dredmorbius/pen/KpMqqB) and static site generators.