A radical idea, lets all go back to blogs, hosted and owned by ourselves, on our own sites, which will enrich only us, and where you can write as long and as short as you want, and link to whatever you want.
I guess IndieWeb is also in this space, but ActivityPub probably has the critical mass thanks to Mastodon.
(Mostly I'm interested because in practice I tweet about my blog posts after I publish them and this seems to be how discovery works, so I might as well make my blog participate in the same protocol as this Twitter-replacement everyone seems excited about.)
https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume
I'm aware that Micro.blog (mentioned elsewhere) is looking at ActivityPub support of some kind soon. I think the IndieWeb movement and the federated blogging/don't-call-it-tweeting movement are close enough that they should be working toward interoperability.
The ActivityPub part requires dynamic processing of messages from peers, as well as sending or forwarding messages.
An "upgraded" version of it would be to parse another RSS/Atom feed for your blog. Make an excerpt of the content that's 496 - <link_length> and then construct the toot to be "<excerpt>... <link>".
Of course, native integration would be far better, but it would go way out of the scope of static site generators.
Don't even need to know how FTP works or how to code anything to do that...
If playing an endless game of whack-a-mole trying to keep up with the a constant stream of vulnerabilities seems fun, then sure.
Personally I wouldn't touch WordPress with a 10-foot pole. I would consider something like Ghost instead.
I've been using this method since WP was first added to Fantastico, way back in the day. A form of lazy versioning I guess.
We're not talking about companies who need high availability. Your personal blog can handle a day down while you restore from backup (it's just a few clicks from the CPanel, the wait for the email saying it's ready).
If you're a HN regular, you can probably build a site using GitHub Pages. I'm just not sure about the Facebook-using public...
That's already above the 'interested enough to do it' threshold of 99% of the population
Its easy to install, but its not easy to keep up & maintain the VPS WP installation for an average user like me.
Last year I came across GitLab pages & jekyll; & now its easy to maintain. Yes, not easy to start.
Savvy individuals could manage it themselves, by creating their own servers and encrypting the traffic and only granting access to trusted individuals. Most people, though, would have a hard time navigating that. A centralized (or perhaps semi-centralized, a la Mastodon) could help a lot on that front.
Perhaps something comparable to Google+'s Circles concept. I always thought that was a great idea which was unfortunately rendered completely unworkable by the unfortunate accident that it was implemented by Google.
You’re forgetting that they also currently monitor everything everyone is reading, not just writing.
Until they are aware of this.
I still have to personally hold onto the belief that no one mind is ever intrisincally more strong than any other mind. That's the belief assumed to be axiomatic and foundational for all the studying of minds people do.
If I can predict how I believe you will think, I assume I'm mentally stronger, but that stuff is not something anyone can hold onto as a certainty. At least that's my belief, my own faith, my own boundary I believe in that must not be violated. Trying to intentionally control how people think is extremely violent, to me. Just because it doesn't look violent, doesn't mean it's not.
Spyware monitoring my browsing habits, down to the real-time location of my mouse pointer, is not something I want to be exfiltrated from my computer and correlated into a political or commercial profile.
I've been toying around with writing my own social media software along those lines, using servers. Some noodling about on that topic: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/
There are free plugins like buddypress wihch can make more complex systems, private, public, semi-private groups for friends and content, stuff like that. Many others like s2member and such.
only trickery is if you have a widget displaying a list of published "pages" on your site, you may need to get into that widget and tell it to not display page 10398 if that is one you are trying to keep under wraps and yet be available for your secret friends, published, but not listed as another comment mentions with docuwiki, and I think youtube has a similar option.
there are many auto backup options with basic free plugins too, so I think WP would cover what you are describing.
Definitely need added security plugins as these are auto targetted for breaking into regularly, good ones are free and available.
You could always put it in a sub folder and add in an htaccess extra htpasswd to lock it down further and such of course as well.
How about sending yourself emails, categorised into their own maildir or IMAP folder, or even a brand new account? That would inherit security from your email setup (which is monotonically more secure than systems which delegate password resetting to your email account).
You can read and write them online or offline using a variety of readers and editors, including some self-hosted browser-based clients (e.g. RoundCube, etc.).
You also get a bunch of tooling for free, e.g. for backups (offlineimap, isync, etc.), indexing/searching (e.g. mu), etc.
What I'm envisioning is a desktop or phone app where you author posts and comments and read other people's posts and comments. The information is stored locally, but published out via a dumb server, with end-to-end encryption. Essentially, the server becomes an async dumb pipe (can just use WebDAV for this) or optionally a synchronous dumb pipe (if you add in a streaming protocol for notifications, such as websockets).
The software could also push up a static website made of any public posts, I suppose. :-)
I feel quite strongly that most users would benefit from their own device being the system of record for their posts, with the server functioning as coordination point and secondarily as an emergency backup.
(I'll be posting in more detail about this if you follow my blog's feed.)
You're right that some other solution would be better for "private but shared" content (although it would likely be tricky w.r.t. both security and psychological/social aspects like getting people to follow good practices to prevent leaks).
Some parts are public, some parts are private, and some parts are public but unlisted. Not perfect, but it works for me.
What if there was a reddit, but designed like a Planet Blog aggregator.
Comments would go back to your own site, but the ranking in the list would be based on votes.
Wish people wouldn't use medium.