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Comment by tinsmith | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the process of starting a webspace where I can both blog and write short fiction. So many people have tried to push me toward Substack instead of building my own space, but like you, Substack just looks too ephemeral for my taste. It feels like the hot new platform that everyone talks about migrating to, might try it for a month or two, then goes back to whatever they were doing before. Maybe I am wrong?

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Agreed. Even when you own the space, from time to time you revamp some major subsystem (e.g. your typesetting pipeline) and it's a pain. But at least its on your terms.

If your hoster shuts down, you're looking at lot of work to port your stuff elsewhere.

That said, there are a lot of things about Substack that I like. They're doing a pretty good job of it.

That said, I still 100% plan to host my own stuff. :)

I don't know. I know that nothing digital is truly permanent outside of like CD-Rs and Project Silica, but websites you own tend to be way, way more permanent than services like Xanga, MySpace, old LiveJournal, etc. and I don't see how Medium, Substack, and their similars also manage to hang around.

It's the age old 'control of technology vs convenience of content authoring'.

Personally, I don't think so.

Decided to reboot my website and blog over the holidays for various reasons though I haven't repointed my domain to it yet. I'm not interested in monetizing. In retrospect, I should maybe have just hosted it somewhere like Lightsail rather than using Wordpress.com. But I can always do so when the hosting I bought needs to be renewed.

My personal experience is that the lack of things to fiddle with (themes etc), the pleasant writing interface plus the knowledge that I have the privilege of sending something into inboxes have made me much more disciplined than I ever was on a blogging platform. And I didn’t expect that at all!

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