HN Reader

Blogs over networks, protocols over platforms. Decentralize as much as you possibly can.

>All of these let you use a custom domain, which you should do. Buy yourname.com. It costs ten dollars a year and your writing will live at an address you control, regardless of what happens to any particular platform.

I used to tell this to anyone who would listen. I changed my mind.

For an individual, renting and managing one's own domain is a costly PITA that gets you less than nothing in return. I've done it for a quarter of a century. The UX of DNS hasn't improved (it's still impossible for normies). Registrars' prices haven't dropped. The security hazards of artisanal hosting are more real than ever. And even if you take the hosting package, your custom domain still carries a fatal weakness: stop paying and it goes away in short order.

And for what? Your blog will be indexed by search engines wherever it is. Moreover, it will be archived by the Internet Archive wherever it is, and - let's be honest - the IA is where your writing is going to survive if anywhere at all. Custom domains are not just vain, they're ephemeral. Certainly more so than, say, the domain of a blogging platform that's managed by a non-profit.

A domain represents an ongoing maintenance commitment and cost. By definition, such things are better managed by groups than by individuals. For the purpose of a personal blog, where no financial interests are at stake, there's only one possible reason to get a custom domain: vanity.

Back in the early eighties people would go to a shop and buy "a VisiCalc". What they were actually getting was an Apple Ii pre-loaded with VisiCalc software. But to them, VisiCalc was the computer.

> Search engines still index blogs far better than social media posts.

For a lot of people, social media is the internet. They don't discover things on search engines, they are guided to them by engagement engines in walled gardens.

And increasingly what they're bwing guided to is commercial, mimetic slop. Most people are, unfortunately, not interested in the fairly high-minded content that the article's author is referring to. I wish it were otherwise.

I've had a blog for twenty five years. I try to do the right thing, and I get no views. Thats because blogging as an artesian activity is dead. Which is its great strength.

> When I write a blog post, I'm writing for an imagined reader who has arrived at this specific URL because they're interested in this specific topic

to me, this is the key point. it often gets conflated with whether the blog has "real time" readers who subscribe to the feed and read the articles as they come out, but I think there is real value in just having a blog engine be your static site generator and/or cms.

I'm still blogging. I'm still reading blogs. A lot of us are. Good points against social media. But that's still how people find bloggers these days.