I see more and more content creators realizing they aren't in charge of the channel on which create their content on - and then not knowing what to do about it. Medium, Youtube, Soundcloud, Reddit, Twitch, Tiktok - these companies are getting a hell of a deal with content creators giving things away for free. When things are going well with YouTube and the like it's fine - but what happens if you get unwarranted strikes - and then you lose your community. Content creators really need to build their community management side first and then start posting on the big sites mainly for promotion. Patreon has done a good job in this space. Ghost as well per this writer. What are some other services that allow you to keep your subscriber email list?
The value-add of these services is pretty substantial, though. Free hosting alone is pretty big, since even setting up two servers to host your videos (one EU, one US) won't be as good as Google's global peering and edge storage servers[0]. And the web in terms of discoverability is dead - even if everyone used RSS readers and creators hosted their own videos, how do they find new viewers that want to watch their content without resorting to traditional advertising, or hoping word-of-mouth (online forums, IRL, or otherwise) works?
this only applies to situations where your content is large in terms of byte count.
For textual content, there's barely any real cost tbh. a caching layer solves most of your problems with edge node speed (so you pay cloudflare or akamai or some such).
> The value-add of these services is pretty substantial, though.
For videos (and music to a degree), it's unique in that the content size is huge, and people are increasingly impatient. I have no doubt that youtube infrastructure cannot be replicated by a private person. Therefore, their services are not "value-adds", but the primary value, and your video content is the "value add".
"Discoverability online" is a perennial question. And it's a rabbit hole as well since there's more then one way of exploring, discovering and consuming information with the question of "relevancy" being entirely context-driven.
Back in the 90s and 00s, the Web/Internet was promoted as a break from traditional mainstream media e.g. flipping between a fixed set of television networks that curated the content you'd get to see that night. It was hailed as this new way of sharing information compared to "40 channels and nothing's on tonight".
"What is the Web supposed to be?" has always been a question. Push or pull? The age of curated feeds and algorithms hasn't answered that question definitively. On the contrary.
> how do they find new viewers that want to watch their content without resorting to traditional advertising, or hoping word-of-mouth (online forums, IRL, or otherwise) works?
The Web/Internet is a game changer when it comes to providing access to services and information anytime any place. But, I don't believe that the Web / Internet was ever going to definitively solve an essentially a challenge of interaction between humans: "How do I get noticed?"
Consider a traditional library. As far as authors are concerned, putting books together and providing catalogues or curated suggestions to patrons doesn't imply that every single one of them will ever see the same reach or get the same readership. Not unless their work gets actively promoted.
Putting your work online - whether self-hosted or via a platform - only moves that challenge from the analogue to a virtual space.
Your mentioning RSS readers is interesting because subscribing to RSS feeds implies that you went through a phase or process of discovery first. Maybe someone recommended someone else's blog. Maybe you stumbled upon a blog via a blogroll. Maybe it's a blog of a friend who gave you their domain at a social occasion. There's just more then one way for a feed to arrive in your RSS reader.
To my mind, some of the criticisms about the quality of content on platforms, or what platforms recommend in their feeds, today draw parallels to criticisms given regarding last century's TV networks. To an extent, I think it's because the recommendation feeds of these platforms work just the same way: as constant feed that's passively consumed, having consumers flicking through whatever is presented until something engaging passes along.
Not at the scale YouTube operates; the maybe 100k english creators (and a million more elsewhere) that have a full-time job doing content creation wouldn't have it without YT's discoverability algorithm.
There seems no way to prove or disprove that statement, since the evolution of the web created this reality and a different reality never got tested.
The current reality arguably depended on significant forks in the road of history, at least some of which might have been somewhat random.
For example, in a different, less monopolistic, version of evolution, there might be twice as many content creators, each making about half as much money.
Yep. There is a term less used nowadays online and that is for good reason. User Generated Content. All the big sites operate based on this system. Build a good enough system for people to generate content on, give them a pat on the head when they do it, sit back and watch the dollery-doos come in. If you read the post you'll see I never planned to stay on Medium, without sounding like I think I know everything and I'm full of myself, I knew Medium wasn't going to be the place for my content to live, but it was easy to test it there.
Yeah I think the optimal strategy these days is to host your own content, then build a following on Twitter, Reddit, etc. and link to it there. Post summaries with the link, but the keep full source text at your own site. Maybe also use a blog comment system like Discourse or Disqus to help with vitality.
Not really, they shut people down too, unfairly and without recourse. They shut down Sargon of Akkad for using bad words while arguing against racism, for example.
And don’t forget - Visa and Mastercard have started to go after content they don’t like (mostly porn and hate speech - but you never know where they’ll draw the line a year or two from now.)
I mean, this is a direct quote of what Sargon said:
“I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n***s, just so you know. You act like white n***s. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I’m really, I’m just not in the mood to deal with this kind of disrespect.”
“Look, you carry on, but don’t expect me to then have a debate with one of your f*gots.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you’re just acting like a n**r, mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me.”
You're being pretty disingenuous with your recollection of events.
I’m not being disingenuous. I didn’t follow him at all, but learned about the incident after Sam Harris spoke about it and subsequently moved off of Patreon.
You may not agree with the tone, I don’t either, but he’s debating literal white nationalists in this quote - and he knew what words they use to hurt others the most (the n and f words) so he used them against the white nationalists he was debating.
I wouldn’t recommend anyone try to do this in 2022, but you can’t argue that he’s a racist from this when you understand the context (again: literally arguing with avowed racists against racism).
It’s like people’s brains turn off the second they hear an offensive word.
> and he knew what words they use to hurt others the most (the n and f words) so he used them against the white nationalists he was debating.
I don't understand the logic here. There's no logical reason to think these racial/homophobic slurs would hurt the white nationalists or cause them to rethink their viewpoints.
> you can’t argue that he’s a racist from this when you understand the context (again: literally arguing with avowed racists against racism).
Is he not literally digging deeper into these same racist stereotypes to make his point? That's how I interpret the two quotes. He's equating the white nationalists to those two groups in order to denigrate the nationalists, which implies the two groups are also bad.
My take is that he’s attempting to use their world view (that Europeans are more civilized than others) against them by pointing out they’re the ones with brutish views and violent behavior, and they’re white. He’s not espousing their views, he’s showing their inconsistency.
By the way, from what little I know about him, I don’t agree with much that he believes. But in any case, Patreon was wrong to deplatform him (something Twitter and YouTube haven’t done).
My friend, if you think using those terms in that context is acceptable then I'm afraid this conversation has ran its course. It is my opinion that using those terms derogatorily is unquestionably racist/homophobic, regardless of who you're using them against. Your original comment was disingenuous due to the omission of key details regarding which "bad words" he used, and how they were used. Most people would agree that there's nothing wrong with saying bad or offensive words, but racial and homophobic slurs? Not so much.
What a foolishly absolutist bunch of woke nonsense. These kinds of words aren't evil spells from some era of religious fanaticism. They're just words, and for such things context always matters, meaning that they can be said for all sorts of reasons that don't make one a racist.
You're free to disagree. I'm just explaining why the omission of those details changes the discussion greatly for people who hold similar beliefs to me. His original comment was framed in a way such that nobody could disagree, while the actual context makes it far less black and white.
I’m gay so perhaps I understand how these words can be hurtful better than you do.
But context matters. And I’m not going to get worked up by someone using slurs against white nationalists in a debate, even if I think it was misguided.
Context does matter, but the context is that the podcaster in question wasn't someone cleverly deconstructing white nationalism, but an edgelord who routinely says offensive things for attention (choice cuts: the video in which he tackles statements as apparently in need of contesting as "it's not OK to call me a fag" with such ingenious ripostes as "I don't even know that you're gay, but you're still a fucking fag" and his much-publicised comments about an MP being too ugly to rape) losing his temper at the white nationalist he'd invited on for a cosy chat because they were more interested in mocking his posh accent than finding common ground with him. A podcast persona he defends with the statement "Personally, I find racist jokes funny" . If a corporation decides it doesn't want to be associated with his content any more, it's not because they've completely misunderstood where he's coming from.
Yes, context matters. Hence why I added context that you disingenuously left out. You're free to disagree with my view, but you massively downplayed the situation when you called racial and homophobic slurs "bad words" in your original comment. This is important context which should not be omitted.
> I’m gay so perhaps I understand how these words can be hurtful better than you do.
Gay community successfully reclaimed all the slur words (gay, queer, fag etc).
While I wish everyone could do that (change themselves to not to be offended, instead of demanding me to endlessly change my words), that's not the case, slur words still exist.
Lots of Americans (maybe even most) would agree with you.
But the people currently in power (institutional, corporate, and government) are all settled that this is the new standard. So we all have to pretend to agree or get kicked out of school, fired, or deplatformed.
gay and queer are not offensive even outside the community. It is acceptable for other people to use them. I haven't heard fag used non-offensively even inside the community, but maybe that's what needs to happen. Personally, I think it's great and that's what should happen to all slurs. They mean after all just "X but bad". When you turn them into just "X", you disarm the offenders and so the trend loses its memetic ability to replicate throughout tribes, and so people are less likely to denigrate only to assert their position as part of a tribe.
Yeah, I think they should be classified as common carriers since a lot of the money individuals spend in the western world gets filtered through their coffers.
If they are allowed to decide who they will do business with on "moral" grounds what protections are there for people when those morals shift?
"Sorry, you're an unmarried mother, and we frown upon that so you're not allowed to use your debit card any more" is a stretch, but roughly 60 years ago it was the norm and we could easily backslide to that era again.
This is what happens when every word is recorded and every word is a 'statement'.
The English culture was heavily influenced by Kant who argued for a duty ethic, which was trained into schoolboys by the observation and participation in moral emotions during classroom tasks.
Sargon is making a (very lazy) appeal to emotional reasoning, to which Brits would respond. The idea that you don't fulfill the category of behaviour you're 'supposed to be', is something Brits can hear in his text and everyone else (except some aussies and canadians) doesn't hear.
The idea that these racists are not 'behaving white' and they are being like the thing they rail against, isn't to be understood on face value, it is supposed to generate emotional self reflection in the people that were raised in that philosophy.
I've never liked Sargon, he always appears so smug. Probably an unwelcome judgement, but he's not racist from that statement. Just an idiot.
The entire statement is founded on racist reasoning to engender an emotional response. If you're racist tactically, that still means you're racist. Just like the person who was quoted was being.
You seem to mean being a "racist" is just saying racist things. Which means nearly nothing to me. I have no idea what you mean by Racist Reasoning™ when his real reasoning is completely different to what you have experienced before, as I described above.
There is meaning to words further than Prima Facie. We aren't programmed robots that interpret words like a machine, they have an added effect on the rest of our human 'functionality', which people commonly try to access via emotions, persuasion and hypothetical arguments.
Real racism happens whether or not you police saying Racist Words. The fact that I have to explain this is beyond credibility.
It would appear that racism in your country is like saying some Magic Words that summon angry political groups and has almost nothing to do with intent, logic, meaning or anything else. Just saying words is bad enough to be condemned, like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter.
I had more explanation written out, showing how the traditional Scholastic dialogue works in Master and Commander, when Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany are discussing the fate of a sailor who failed to salute, and how they let go of making "official statements" in favour of personal, emotional arguments and come upon the truth through that dialogue. I have lost interest in responding to this hyper-literal, internet Enlightenment view which encourages mediocrity and tribalism.
I have zero sympathy for your view, it oversimplifies life into a world-view that can't contain it and has almost no meaning. If this is where the conversation ends, I would be very happy with that.
> You seem to mean being a "racist" is just saying racist things.
What's with racism purism? That you have to embody racism with your whole self in order to be really racist. I never see this purist concept applied to anything else: "Oh, he was only saying libertarian ideas, that doesn't mean he's libertarian" - sure, but why does it matter if the speaker is libertarian (or not)? What matters, and is indisputable, is their statement was libertarian.
You don't see a lot of "purist" stuff because it happens in the emotions and feelings where normal language is shaped to make for a movement in those areas without having to be explicit about it. That's the whole point and why Sargon's move was so lazy using explicit swear words and cheap logic.
>but why does it matter if the speaker is libertarian (or not)? What matters, and is indisputable, is their statement was libertarian.
Because you can't contain people in speech. How is this even a question? Policing speech does one third of what the unwritten rules and unspoken feelings do for maintaining social order. You can feel a father's disapproval, you can be emotionally moved towards the Good, ect, ect. The speech acts nearly always come after the thing that happened.
A car crash always has people mourning and setting up new safety rules and making 'indisputable statements' well after the event itself. Most 'statements' are just empty posturing and perfect-form chasing.
Golly gosh this feels like taking a horse to water but being unable to make it drink.
If it bothers you this much when someone tells you not to speak in a manner that's offensive to most people and tuned in a way explicitly to foster that offense (in this case because it's racist), that really says the most about you.
Racist language is a part of racism, just like nazi dogwhistles are a part of nazism. Perhaps this is offensive to you and that sucks, but it doesn't change the fact that this is how terrible people advertise themselves. By using their reasoning, their words and their stance on other people you signify that you sympathise. That is all anyone really needs to understand about this linguistic smokescreen.
What you quoted I find incredibly disturbing and unnecessary. But at the same time it seems like an attempt to fight fire with fire, with “their” language. So I get what he is trying to achieve here.
I’m not a fan of this tactic. But as someone who has been attacked by neonazis multiple times, I don’t mind as much if people are aggressive towards them. Tolerance paradox.
I still think it’s counterproductive, because it acknowledges their ways to a certain degree? Hard to pin down.
> Visa and Mastercard have started to go after content they don’t like
I'm an incredible crypto skeptic, but this has to be one of the better arguments for crypto to exist and be convenient for payment. No other argument resonates like this one.
The crypto exchanges could take the same position as the credit card companies. Then you are stuck using on-chain transactions and paying fees. Plus you have the inherent risks and instability of most crypto systems (the most popular of which murder the climate). No thanks.
They have done this before but the old saying in crypto is 'not your keys, not your coins'. You dont need an exchange. But it does help and make things easier.
Technically, you don't need an exchange. Practically, you do at some point in the chain.
Say this Sargon guy or some other personality with a rep takes payments/donations in BTC. Okay, and what then? You can't pay your rent with that, unless you're renting from some crypto fan, and they also can't pay for their taxes/groceries/gas/etc with crypto. At some point, if crypto is used as money there has to be an exchange.
And since crypto is very traceable it's very possible you won't be able to exchange coins with some sort of murky history to them. If you'd have a problem, then your landlord likely also has a problem. And you probably don't want to be on the wrong side of your landlord.
Except you don't - they can be sold and bought entirely without a digital middleman. You can buy goods for them. It's not a weird thought to keep them entirely as themselves, forever.
As for the "crypto is very traceable" angle, it's honestly kind of tired and wrong. If it's something you care about, you have solutions available. Arguing about it as if it's some sort of absolute is disingenuous.
> Except you don't - they can be sold and bought entirely without a digital middleman. You can buy goods for them. It's not a weird thought to keep them entirely as themselves, forever.
Where do you pay rent and pay for groceries with crypto?
> As for the "crypto is very traceable" angle, it's honestly kind of tired and wrong. If it's something you care about, you have solutions available. Arguing about it as if it's some sort of absolute is disingenuous.
I know mixers exist. And a lot of exchanges ban their use, which is detectable.
You can always use a privacy coin. Even if they get banned from exchanges, you can transact within the coin, then use an atomic cross-chain swap to cash out to bitcoin.
Alternately, there's decentralized mixing algorithms like CoinJoin that are indistinguishable from normal transactions with multiple inputs and outputs. Bitcoin's Wasabi wallet and Ethereum's Tornado cash do this.
Privacy is really a solved problem for anyone who wants to solve it.
> The crypto exchanges could take the same position as the credit card companies. Then you are stuck using on-chain transactions and paying fees.
That seems incredibly unlikely. They didn't shut it down for ape pictures and Matt Damon. You lump libertarians in with sex positive people and you can't really tell them apart anymore.
> Plus you have the inherent risks and instability of most crypto systems
True.
> (the most popular of which murder the climate).
Everything we do murders the climate. We're not going to fix the problem without a total economic shutdown. Pointing fingers at crypto folks when Google is training ginormous ML models it won't release and while everyone else continues to fly, drive, enjoy indoor temperatures, eat meat, and buy plastic is a bit like throwing rocks in a glass house.
As the author is the blog post and a non-techie crypto advocate I can tell you when I've been paid in Crypto by people in other countries for work I have done that right there is the only reason I need to support and advocate for Crypto. No bank needed, no government approval needed. Just them to me and if the upswings and downswings of crypto scare you, use a reputable stable coin.
Register your domain. Write on that domain (using CMS you control). And then use a range of social media / forums / creator platforms to get traffic to your site.
> Write on that domain (using CMS you control). And then use a range of social media / forums / creator platforms to get traffic to your site.
Or if you want to eat your cake and have it too, follow the POSSE strategy to get the discoverability benefits of services like Medium without betting the farm on it.
You don't even have to pay for hosting or anything. Keep your stuff on github and use a CDN with free integration. It's fire and forget as long as you keep the domain registered. If github or your CDN misbehaves moving is pretty trivial and doesn't affect your site's content or address.
Word can export html and there are GUIs for github that don't need skills. I guess you could say there's some small amount of learning involved but it's extremely minimal. Arguably not more than these social media sites.
It never ends. The goalposts will be moved from youtube to patreon, from patreon to visa (this has already been done), from visa to web hosts, from hosts to DNS registrars etc etc. The problem is the mob itself, not its means. The somewhat-bulletproof solutions would involve blockchain
I mean, it's always a tradeoff, whatever you do. Whenever anybody offers anything, they don't do it unlimited, for free and no strings attached, so over time, no matter what they offer, the limits, the price or the terms will become a liability. Often it changes over time: what didn't matter back then, matters now.
Also, these companies are getting a hell of a deal now. Now that they are so successful that you know them by heart. And only maybe are they getting that deal, YouTube for one bled money like there's no tomorrow for a very long time, maybe even know.
Creators, and people in general need to do realize that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. And assess and manage their risk.
Is the idea you have to run your own site first. If the idea is you can convert followers and engagement from a big platform to your own, then you should be able to do it after you have a large following on a platform as well.
That way you can find a content market fit using a big platform then move people over and monetize.
There are clearly a couple issues with this now. Is the main problem here not having a host your own version of all the mediums creators use to get an audience? Ghost solves this for blogging, but I don't know anything for tik tok or Instagram or twitch.
Or is there a reason you couldn't move over a lot of audience late in the game? And if not, why not/would the reasons you can't stop you from building an audience in the first place?
"but I don't know anything for tik tok or Instagram or twitch."
Remember, its worse than just a lack of software. Text is dirt cheap (not processing text mind), whereas images, videos, require several orders of magnitude larger data, and several orders of magnitude more processing power.
CDNs are one bit of the puzzle, large specialized providers which will cache and store images around the globe for you, but those require obviously dedicated servers, associated hosting fees...
The other portion, then obviously, is bandwidth. Even if you can get away without a CDN, you still need good up/down speeds, as do your users. The solution is/was partially to use bittorrent or other file-share protocols to offload your bandwidth. OFC, then come issues like defending your work from theft, etc, all of which are issues with the simple centralized system as well, not actually at odds with file sharing (you can implement DRM over bittorrent if you wanted to).
No, here you can squarely point at RIAA, MPAA, US Congress (Interpol in the EU), and blame them for the current state affairs, bad policies having caused media monopolies. Until you strike down some of their more nonsensical decisions and bring the world back to file-sharing, alternatives to popular, performant, and widely available image/video sharing applications are not going to exist.
These are the main problems as I see it: 1) Content creators are busy creating content, they have little time to create an independent membership site. For streamers, beyond the streaming there isn't a whole lot that one could offer on a membership site. Twitch owns you. Maybe game coaching? IDK. For a recipe creator on Tiktok, a membership site makes sense. You can offer full recipes and full walkthroughs with engagement on recipes. 2) You don't own your followers list - it's hidden behind by the social media company. If the algo changes, if you get a violation of ToS, and so on. You have no idea when you might lose your audience access. Owning the list protects you.
Like most Internet enthusiast, I signed up for Medium when it started and have somehow gotten over 4,500 followers. I have no clue why as I write mostly about our family stories, and some technology stories targeted at non-technical parents, etc. etc.
Since then, I had moved to my own domain as I realized most people are asked/forced to signup and sometimes have to "pay to read". I do make sure I do not tick that monetize button/checkbox or have never agreed to be a paid editor. I even changed my username and I continue to pay for Medium to support other editors (and of course, read their stories).
I like Ghost but aren't they doing lot of things and blogging is not the main/default thing anymore? On that note, if you want to quickly try out Ghost, I have been happy with pikapods.com (I have no relationship with them). I start with them, if things go north, perhaps figure out dedicated resources.
Ghost is very generally focused on content creation with emphasis on memberships. They don’t specialize in any specific kind of content creation, but you can’t expect a Wordpress experience or something you might tailor from a static site generator either.
It’s perfectly fine for classic blogging, though. They aren’t neglecting or abandoning it. In fact it’s excellent, and I’ve used it almost as long as it has existed.
If you want to slap up a site for your podcast, a newsletter, a news site, etc. it isn’t a bad choice. Their theme market is a fairly good representation of what Ghost is good at; they have categories which cover, more or less, what it’s intended and expected to be used for.
Yeah I went back and forth on the box ticking of the Medium Partner Program, probably something I should have added to the post...In the end I went with it because I wanted to recoup my money back. I think I only read 1-2 Medium stories every month if that, and its just not worth it IMO.
Ghost do different things and yes blogging is one of them.
With Home Assistant[1] we use Ghost for our newsletter[2]. Besides ease of use and great design as article points out, it also was the only newsletter host that allowed us to disable all the tracking.
> Ghost, like Medium, is clean, it is minimal, but that is about where the similarities end.
I don't think that website that loads 2,5Mb of js, keep making post request on every action, and shows pop ups on everything you hover/select clean and minimal. It may not be the worst, but not minimal on my book.
That is not medium's fault, but there is even a 2,5Mb gif which takes almost half the size of page. Some people don't like mobile metered connection user.
When people bring up static site generators as an alternative I have rarely seen CMS being part of it. For a developer always with access to an editor and terminal, sure, it is easy to push out that markdown file and have it rendered as a blog post.
But if you want to edit on the go, connecting your setup to a CMS is epic. I now have Forestry linked to my Github+Jekyll blog and don't have to worry about having access to a terminal to blog.
It does seem to clog up the commit history though, something to figure out soon...
It was really simple to set up as a Docker container, it is pretty fast due to not having a backing database but instead being file based, allows for some customization in the form of plugins (e.g. RSS/Atom feeds), is themeable and also reasonably secure (as long as you consider using additional auth in front of /admin, though the admin module itself is entirely optional, you can just write blog posts with a text editor, should you so choose).
Of course, there's not much of a network there to speak of, in regards to discoverability, nor is there any kind of advertising that would give me passive income from my writing (apart from a link to a VPS hosting provider, where I get discounts on my own hosting if someone signs up). However, using your own self-hosted blog is perfectly viable nowadays, should you so choose!
Also, if you need a Wiki, some folks out there strongly recommend BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/) and in regards to communication you can use Mattermost (https://mattermost.com/) or something like it. Not to detract from the actual article itself, it's just that we live in a pretty great time with plenty of options, be it cloud based ones, or self-hosted software! Heck, I even have a PeerTube instance up and running which acts as a backup for my gaming/programming Twitch stream VODs, should YouTube ever purge things on their end.
Edit: link to the root page of the blog, for a quick example of how it looks https://blog.kronis.dev/ (some might also use WordPress, although it's more heavy and security begs more attention)
China blocks the whole site. Other authoritarian countries block it for a while whenever somebody posts something that ruffles feathers there. Egypt and Malaysia have blocked it a couple of times.
It is blocked in Vietnam. Normally here you don't really need a good reason to censor things. Just one random dissident writing something on Medium is good enough to block the entire domain.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of the poster and their excitement for moving platforms, but this really reads like an advertisement for ghost, especially with all the specifically selected anchor texts and no mention of any other alternative options.
It’s not like they hide their desire to have sponsored posts and affiliate programs.
I have read absolutely nothing else they have written but judging by this “organic content” I would certainly pay them to shill some crypto scam if I were into that sort of thing.
I am currently thinking about how to set up a new content website. So I looked at the existing solutions. Wordpress, Jekyll etc etc etc.
I did not find a solution that I like. I came to the conclusion that a solution should be file based and the tool that turns it into a website should be a single script:
# File based
The content, templates and assets should be stored as files on disk. No database should be involved.
# Single script
I don't think turning templates, content and assets into a website is a complex thing. Basically it just means some templating of the content according to the templates. A small script that I can easily read should be sufficient.
So I will probably write that script myself. Currently, I expect the templates to be what I call "simplified Twig style":
The content will be plain HTML. With metadata in YAML similar to how Jekyll does it:
---
layout: post
title: Hello World
---
Hello world, this is my first blog post.
And this is my dog:
<img src="dog.jpg" alt="My dog">
Say the script that is creating the website from the templates, content and assets is called create.py. Then create.py is supposed to be something like 50 lines of Python for the first version. And to stay under 500 lines forever. Additional functionality can be achieved via plugins:
---
layout: post
title: Hello World
convert: markdown2html.py
---
Hello world, this is my first blog post.
And this is my dog:
It’s not clear what you don’t like about static site generators. Obviously it’s more fun to build one yourself, but using Hugo, Jekyll, Nanoc yields your website faster (measured in developer-time).
There are couple great solutions that fit points you describe. One of them is Statamic (https://statamic.dev/blade) which is IMO the best flat-file CMS currently available with a lot of flexibility if you're dev and want to extend to it (it's free for solo writers). Another one that I know is GravCMS (https://getgrav.org/). I didn't have much experience with Grav, but it looks OK.
Good luck with that.
Personally I don't see a point in avoiding dependencies. I'll always trust more software that is built on collective wisdom with carefully picked dependencies, rather than a single (or couple) geeks that put everything in single file, avoiding dependency hell. To me that's a red flag.
With a single script with 50 lines of code, I will forever be able to pick it up again, understand it, use it, improve it. Handling will be quick. No installation, just copy the script, run it, done.
Using a project made of thousands of files and dependencies, there is way more maintenance ahead. Handling is slower and more cumbersome. If the project moves in a direction I don't like, maintaining a fork would be too much work.
I have to work on a legacy site using statamic v2 regularly and I absolutely hate it; it's slow as all hell and littered with template rendering and parsing bugs.
I'm sure v3 is nicer though from the amount of times I've searched the docs with an issue and seen "fixed in v3".
You shuld check out Server Side Includes (SSI) which enables you to do inludes, run scripts etc via the webserver (Apache, Nginx). Caddy has its own version that also handles Mardown and Frontmatter. Caddys own documentation is using this feature in fact, and the source is available for those who want to see how it works. It's called "Templating" in Caddy, not SSI.
I have a very similar setup. The python script is about 60 lines including sftp push. Haven't hardly changed it since I first got it working, but then again, I don't write all that much.
I spent the better part of a month last year shopping for a blogging platform before I decided that it was actually easier to build my own. I went through Gatsby, ghost, Jekyll, and notion.
This is the most basic rails app you can get and it does everything I need. When I needed to customize it for the "projects" tab, that was simple too.
You can easily setup Ghost without signing up by using their open source version. Use something like railway.app, digital ocean or other platforms to setup Ghost in literally 5 mins.
For technical blogging, IMHO, the absolutely essential requirements are good support for math notation and code snippets (with nice syntax highlighting). So I am constantly surprised why technical bloggers write on medium, which supports neither.
I've also moved over to a self-hosted solution, but when using Medium previously, I just embedded GitHub gists for code blocks. Looks nice, has good syntax highlights, can get the raw gist, etc. Not ideal, but not terrible.
I wonder why they haven't implemented this after so many years. It can't be much more difficult than integrating highlight.js and MathJax, and it's lost them at least one big publication (Hackernoon)
Love the idea of just using Replit or similar web-based/cloud editor/IDE to create the content. And I also like the idea of having Replit control/host the content/files whilst also pushed to a GH repo.
So far I’ve been too lazy to attempt it though. Have just had that tab open in my browser for months as a reminder/todo to friggin do it but hasn’t happened yet..
If you are stuck on completing this long-ass tutorial that you linked, I’d suggest not overcomplicating it and just launching a VM, droplet, or even just paying a provider for blog hosting. For me Ghost worked very well for this purpose.
I’ve had this happen to me far too many times: my engineering sensibilities get in the way of just putting the stuff out there.
My suggestion is to off the engineering cap and pretend like your blog or website is a business. What return on investment do you get out of all the time spent writing configuration/code, figuring out your deployment scheme, and standing up infrastructure?
For me, I didn’t get any, so I decided to scrap my overcomplicated nonsense and spin up a DigitalOcean droplet with a few clicks. Another few clicks to dump it behind Clpudflare, enable some basic VM backups, and add a basic DO firewall and I was done.
I think you’re probably right. All the searching and researching for the exact perfect way to deploy/infra it is likely just part of procrastination in general of the writing and getting down to it. Probably should just throw something on one my 2 or 3 long-idling VMs or one of my OCI free tier instances..
I use the gitlab web ide which also has basic preview support for markdown. I ensure that I keep the markup to a minimum. I don't even use pictures.
When I commit cloudflare (whose build/publish process went from 3-5 minues to seconds) makes it available almost instantly. It's a hugo site which I created by taking a theme I like and gutting unneccessary things. I don't update the code or theme at all and the hugo version is fixed in the cloudflare pages settings. I do not use the hugo tooling at all anymore.
You could also write your own script like a lot of people on HN seemt to be doing and configure the build step to do nothing but take whatever is in your web directory and publish it. (Obviously the same is possible with github. I actually migrated from there. Gitlab can import github repos, and the only change needed on the cloudflare side was change where the repo points to and set up the new token)
The key point is that if you know how to grow your publication without Medium’s help then Ghost is a great option.
I’ve been using Ghost for my newsletter for actuaries using Python and Medium’s distribution would add no value for me at all. Plus the flexibility of Ghost’s integrations - eg with Discourse - is very useful.
I kind of already do that with Hacker Noon and I'm going to try to figure out a way to do something similar with Medium and so I'll have Medium and Hacker Noon pointing stuff to my own domain cryptofireside [dot] com.
Medium and Ghost provide exactly zero value for discoverability. All views come from large content aggregators - Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, HackerNews etc.
I dont think Ghost is supposed to but yes with Medium, they are supposed to show your stuff off and as someone that has been testing out titles, tags, images, post volumes etc. I can tell you I know for a fact nothing you do will get your stuff seen unless Medium feels like helping you. Pro tip, want a lot of views write about any of the hot social and political topics and take the popular mainstream stance and you will likely get a shit load of views.
I modified Ghost to support a non-mailgun email provider (postmark) and it was pretty easy. So easy, I wondered why they never did it even though there were open issues for using other providers. It turns out mailgun has an affiliate program[1] that I venture Ghost is using. The amount of telemetry that ghost sends is also concerning...
Anyway, I abandoned it. I wouldn't recommend Ghost to anyone. It's a good blogging product, but it seems they're in the business of making money and not a great product.
I used Ghost once upon a time. Trying to customize Ghost themes to produce the output I wanted was an absolute nightmare.
My blog migrated from WordPress to Ghost to Medium. Now it’s artisinally hand crafted HTML+CSS+JS hosted on Netlify.
I know almost no one else is going to host their blog this way, but they should. Hand crafting is easier and more flexible than complex and constrained static site generators. The average blogger doesn’t have enough content to make a generator necessary or even valuable.
I've looked hard at various CMSes and decided to roll my own.
The blog is built with Elixir/Phoenix and uses Obsidian MD as an editor. I have a personal plugin on Obsidian that will push my Excalibur drawings and my markdown notes to B2 storage and Postgres DB (one way sync to keep it simple).
With this, I can have my snappy, vim-enabled editor that is also available on my phone and tablet instead of some clunky web editor!
I wish Ghost supported Bitcoin and Monero, without a third party processor. Even Jack Dorsey has advertised it suggesting it could be decentralized with this single feature. I hope they get around to implementing this.
I think it is great that people are switching, but it sounds like they are more or less going to utilize most of the same hosted features that caused issues elsewhere.
I assume he means using a service that might have the same problems later (assuming it doesn't already now) rather than self-hosting (which can have it's own problems, but not those ones).
This.. ultimately, unless you're self-hosting, you will not get the additional benefits. It is way more ideal as well to build your blog around a tool like Hugo where you can at least create your own metrics a lot easier.
Building communities is tough. Monetising them is even tougher. Whoever said Medium is a "blogging platform"? If you can't export your own data easily out of the platform, it's a terrible idea to build something from scratch. I'd stick with Telegram (channels, specifically) because I can automate them for content, and a WordPress blog because I own the medium (not the host). While I have been blogging for over 3 years, I stuck to a niche and don't care much about views. If you are shilling on crypto and web3 blockchain kind of trends, then it will definitely hurt your chances to monetise because of the payment cuts required for payment processors etc.
Its best to have a clear pathway for premium content, be upfront to your readers, and explore other mediums to amplify your reach. The growth won't be sudden, but a slow tick-tock. It all depends on the external algorithms, which care about virality of content.
A shameless plug to demonstrate the richness of content possible in Telegram (https://t.me/thecuriousloop) The content is auto-posted from IFTTT as a manual curation from what I read. I save to a specific Raindrop folder where it gets auto-tweeted and auto-posted to LinkedIn. It allows for comments on all posts and you can post links/multimedia content. Those opting for premium version of Telegram service can upload 4GB files. I do post recommended books and have dedicated section on bypassing paywalls.
This space has turned into a mess, there are so many options now that it's all meaningless. What happened to simply hosting your own blog and building a brand that way? Instead we have gazillions of for profit, ad driven channels that essentially offer the same as a 2005-era wordpress blog in terms of functionality.
I get that a small portion of authors is actually looking to monetize via these platforms but the vast majority don't make a penny on their content and nor are they looking to. So that's not the main driver. As for quality control on these platforms, aside from some censorship, there is none. It's exactly the same type of content you'd find on blogs, Facebook, Linkedin, or wherever else people choose to voice their opinion. So, that's not it either.
I think it's a combination of couple of things:
- Analytics, likes, and feedback & commenting. Most of these platforms have like buttons and give you some notion of success and ways to interact. Everything a wannabe influencer needs basically. Blogs used to have similar features but those got targeted by blog spam. So, people turned off a lot of this stuff because it was just too painful to deal with. I don't think blogs ever recovered from losing that functionality. It's just a bit bare-bones these days. You can fix it if you know what you are doing but out of the box, you have none of it.
- Convenience and safety. Most people don't want to maintain servers or play web admin and they don't want to worry about doing the right things technically (assuming they are capable of that even). They just want to write and hit publish and be done with it. It's an important feature and it's why things like Facebook and Linkedin became popular. Better distribution and low hassle. Medium never really became an important distribution platform. You always have to post your Medium links somewhere else to get an audience.
- Community. These platforms for better or worse function like mini social networks with readers and authors connecting. It's of course a very fragmented space and there are tiny disconnected social clusters all over the internet now. Blogs used to offer a similar experience but there's not much happening there anymore except for a few holdouts. The blogosphere (I hesitate to use the word) is kind of dead.
- Distribution. To get your content some eyeballs, you need to promote it on multiple platforms. This has changed a lot over time. It used to be that you would have followers that would pick up anything you wrote from your RSS feed and then would distribute that to their readership. These days that's less of a thing and you need to distribute via one of the big social networks. Medium as a distribution platform is not that important. You still need the big social networks to share a link on. Not much difference with a self hosted blog.
With Medium, there's definitely a problem. The platform is now so pushy towards it's readers that I can't justify parking any content there. Just not worth it. I've used dev.to on and off for some articles and I kind of liked that experience and I appreciate the community there. I tend to cross post on my own website still. But altogether it's far less often than I used to blog.
> The platform is now so pushy towards it's readers
There "we and our partners track you without opt-out, like it or lump it" had earned their domains a place in my local DNS filter. I can't say I feel I've missed it on anything as a result.
TLDR build an audience on Medium then migrate to Ghost because Medium "kills writers and publications earning potential" while Ghost allows you to bombard your audience with ads and dubious sponsored content.
Don't forget to write a whiny post about it when you're done.
Medium sucks balls. I know someone who was making $2-$5 per month and writing some high quality content, who got kicked out of the partner program for not having 100 followers (as she was more interested in the content then getting followers, but still she got a very healthy following online - just they didn’t click the “follower” button), now she’s getting zero and hasn’t blogged in ages as a result
Yeah and this is what I meant in the post when I said i genuinely think if Satoshi had posted his whitepaper on Medium, no one would have read it. Medium is OK in that its free and IMO its a great way to test content, but their algo favours crap that they know keeps the paid members coming back. They have a wide variety of topics on there but there is no depth. They tell me I am one of their top crypto/bitcoin writers and I think my best month on there was like $70. Which is nothing for the work that is put in. I can get paid 10 X that for writing just 1 article when freelancing.
