Do you remember how the web used to work? How the web was supposed to work?
In the earlier days of the web, we always published to our own web site. If you weren’t happy with your web host, or they went out of business, you could move your files and your domain name, and nothing would break.
Today, most writing instead goes into a small number of centralized social networking sites, where you can’t move your content, advertisements and fake news are everywhere, and if one of these sites fails, your content disappears from the internet. Too many sites have gone away and taken our posts and photos with them.
I want to encourage more independent writing. To do that, we need better tools that embrace microblogs and the advantages of the open web. We need to learn from the success and user experience of social networking, but applied to the full scope of the web.
Can someone help me understand? A lot of my favorite bloggers who don’t participate in mainstream social media and own their own name online and write independently have supported this project in public and promoted it on their blog. To back the project (Book + 12 months on Micro.Blog), you have to donate $100.
What?
You want me to join your silo, pick a username and write on your website w/o any data portability or ability self host and pay you $100 a year for the privilege? It feels like we’re all rallying behind the next Twitter, one that charges and will only be filled with Internet Geeks (early days of Twitter) and we can’t self host. App.net already failed at this.
Eelke: There won’t be a way to run an identical version of Micro.blog yourself at the beginning. It’s something I’d like to explore later. Instead, if you want to self-host you can just use existing weblog software like WordPress.
I’d pay $25 a year to self-host a microblogging client like I do with “WithKnown” (which is free) – https://adamchandler.me/microblog/content/all/
Once this service is live, I’ll check it out but I’m not paying his server bills and one day when he decides to stop hosting all of our blogs, he’ll give us some SQL dump and bid us adieu. Worth repeating from above:
…and if one of these sites fails, your content disappears from the internet.
No thanks. I like to own my writing and not store it on your server. I will try out your code once I can self-host it.