Own your site. Own your data. Put it all on your own terms.
If you need help setting one up (unlikely for this crowd), you can have one made for you for free here.
You're also welcome to cross-post to Able to help build an audience to your blog too. One thing we don't want to do is bait and switch users like other venture funded companies have done recently. We just want to build a good community and charge businesses to advertise jobs to good people.
I understand your skepticism though, hopefully over time we can prove that not everyone has to play that game.
You can read more about our intentions and business model here: https://able.bio/about
And with people you mean ... ? The general public (i.e. "people") don't really care much about their privacy.
Maybe some here don't care about discoverability, but most writers do.
To Able: thank you so much for trying to fill this void. I would recommend that you not focus solely on developer content and hit the casual crowd. We already have options for the tech savvy that work well, and none for casuals. Medium was the only good option for that. Features like the table of contents are nice for technical content, but an eyesore for casual content.
Forget the casual crowd. First reason: It’s always good to start with one demography and fulfilling their requirements. Second and TBH, the casual crowd sucks steel when creating short-form blog content.
Go to the Linkedin blogs, all non-tech Medium blogs, TED talks, Facebook: 99% is useless, already seen, self-help-type advice covered with click-baity titles.
Every Reddit post has more substance and authenticity than the mentioned above.
Edit: To the pro downvoters, instead of downvoting just reply and link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog.
> link to one eg. single useful non-tech Linkedin blog
I agree with the first part of your comment. Narrowing the focus to a specific demo makes it far easier to provide exactly what your target audience needs, thus a higher quality product/service.
But I have doubts about the second part. You're classifying everything in 2 categories, "tech" and "non-tech" (I assume non-IT here) so this particular thing or absolutely everything else all in one bag. How qualified are you to judge the dozens of non-tech fields out there, say psychology, economics, marine biology, or agriculture? Is this a bit of (reverse?) Gell-Mann amnesia effect where you can accurately judge a tech blog on LinkedIn as being good but when it comes to something outside of your field of expertise you assume low quality?
Maybe but when you go from a very low likelihood to begin with increasing it even 10 fold might not make a practical difference.
The point was any one of us here can accurately judge content on a handful of topics in our areas of expertise and to a lesser extent in connecting fields. But we can say next to nothing outside of that. Let alone generalize to "all" platforms and "99%" of content. It's not "tech"/"non-tech" but "what I know"/"what I don't know".
> interesting insights
How would one even realize this if they're an expert web developer reading a blog on astronomy? Every single article on a platform could be either gold or shiny manure and most of us wouldn't really tell the difference unless they solidly overlap with those topics mentioned above.
Of course there are and must be great blogs in non-tech areas but they are not that many. Writing high quality blogs for free seems not be common in other fields. Often people rather publish the findings in a protected space, call it academic paper and I can read just a lousy abstract. Actually most academic non-tech fields fall in this category.
It's a term people use when they want to abdicate their marketing efforts.
Whether you use your own platform or build on someone else's - discoverability almost never "just happens." People put a ton of work into being discovered "organically."
My typical post on Medium got 5,000 to 10,000 views. I’ve had a few break 100k. Medium provided roughly zero views. All my views came from Reddit, HN, Twitter, or Google.
If you’re using Medium for discovery you’re wasting your time.
It's a little frustrating to have low traffic levels -- everyone wants to be famous and loved by millions -- but as it turns out I know my handful of readers on Twitter and it's a fruitful interaction. OTOH I'd be constantly trying to tune my writing to please a mass undifferentiated audience. I'd sound like kdnuggets or some such. Life is too short for that.
Could you syndicate?
For programming topics, I've done that with DZone for years.
Running it on https://sdan.xyz/blog and it's fantastic. I get RSS/subscriptions (https://sdan.xyz/subscribe)/podcasts/a whole plethora of integrations super easily.
And since it's self hosted, you don't need to worry about it ever going down (unlike if Able.bio ever does).
Also, Lighthouse gives Ghost blogs top scores as well :).
Hugo is a valid option though!
Working on a blog post on how I could reduce load times and make it portable, scalable, and reliable (the server itself).
Thanks for the feedback!
Although it does seem to load eventually, I should update it to use some better editor that loads faster!
Also, you waste time fiddling with CSS adjusting crappy themes. Only upside would be post editing in vim.
But again, do something smarter, too many new shiny toys wait for you: Tensorflow, Haskell, Rust, ESP32... extend the list yourself.
Switching from wordpress to a static site generator has made it much harder to post for me. Sure I can use vim (or my editor of choice) but on wordpress I could post from any browser on any machine, even a phone or tablet, including images with sites that have a front end. I'm not going back but I'd post more if I had a front end like I had on wordpress. Note: IMO as a middle solution just using github is not enough. Yes I can create a new file from the interface but no preview, clunky image uploading, clucky image embedding, and other issues.
If that's what starting a blog looks like I think I'll start recommending people to Medium or Able now.
One way to create a static site is with GatsbyJS: https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby Or Jekyll: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll