TikTok Shutdown: Why building on proprietary platforms is a risky game
bouia.com
bouia.com
It could really be any list of any contact info that you can export and download as a data file at some point. I have seen physical stores leave clipboards out for people to sign up for a mailing list and that works.
I feel extremely passionate about this topic and I've written extensively on it.
1: Going direct buys you freedom: https://herbertlui.net/going-direct-buys-you-freedom/
2: Own your marketing, own your income: https://herbertlui.net/own-your-marketing-own-your-income/
3: Learning to talk to customers, directly: https://herbertlui.net/learning-to-talk-to-customers-directl...
Of course, I'm not the only one:
The Rostra manifesto is also great! https://www.rostra.co/
There are also the filmmakers buying their own theater: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/westwood...
I think about big/semi-big YouTubers like Jeb Brooks who starts every video introducing his website. Or how Doug DeMuro sends you to cars and bids and sends you to his podcast.
Other creators have premium/“backup plan” type of content hosts like floatplane for Linus tech tips or Nebula for the various documentary-style producers out there.
Basically, don’t make your revenue dependent on a single platform in any way you can.
Own your own domain and anything is possible. Build on someone else's domain and you are always a serf.
yourname.substack.com is worthless and can be taken away at any time. blog.yourname.com can never be taken away[1].
[1] It can be taken away, but if it comes to that point you probably have bigger problems.
Read especially the last paragraph here: https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/the-chagos-archipelag...
I believe that one of two outcomes will occur:
1. The popularity of .io will be incentive enough for Chagos to leave it alone
2. .io is retired and we all have 5 years to deal with it.
You could start your blog with someone like GoDaddy and move it to NameCheap with the import/export tools Wordpress has available.
I can even see from a quick search that proprietary solutions like SquareSpace will let you export a ZIP that you can then import into someone else like Wix.
And set up a mailing list! If you use Substack, buy a domain name. Otherwise you can use ConvertKit, Ghost, etc., and collect your reader's emails directly.
- 50 websites: I just want to have my own website or blog
- 50 GB NVMe Storage: How many blog posts is this?
- 500 Concurrent Visitors: That doesn't sound like a lot, does it?
- Free SSL: What is that and why do I need that for my blog?
- Free CDN: What is that and why do I need that for my blog?
- DDos Protection: What is that and why do I need that for my blog?
Then after selecting plan and finding a domain, you have to give a ton of info and pay about $60 to get to the next steps. Which probably will be a world of pain again.
GoDaddy and other web hosts are the same. Their target public are developers and sys admins, not the general public. That's why the general public uses proprietary services for putting their creative content online. That's why the general public buys iPhones and doesn't care about how many gigabytes of RAM a phone has. That's why they buy new cars and don't know or care how many horses are under the hood.
On proprietary services like social media, you can start writing, posting and uploading at once, without setting up a dozen different services and routing, worrying about security and hacks, or having to pay out of pocket.
Things get even worse if said blogger or content creator would like to purchase groceries and decides to start charging for his/her work. Subscription / payment plugins are a nightmare on WordPress - and expensive to boot. Anybody who wants to keep his sanity will instead go for a proprietary solution.
Just like driving is for everybody and not only mechanics, the internet is for everybody and you shouldn't have to be a programmer or sys admin to be able to express yourself online. Just like you shouldn't have to know how to bore out a cylinder to be allowed on the highways.
You need to know how your car works, however, if you're 50 miles from the nearest garage.
If your livelihood and business depend entirely on a single social media site, that's a problem long term. I'm not talking about creators where their content is a side hustle; if your content creation is your full time income and you have a single point of failure, that should feel scary.
Reminds me of the stories of people that lose access to their Google account. They can't access any account they've created using that email, they had their passwords saved with it, and essentially couldn't function without access. For a more business focused angle, it's reminiscent of the Silicon Valley Bank failure. If you can't operate your business at all if one bank were to fail (or have an outage), that's kind of a problem.
Look at products like EasyWP on Namecheap.
https://www.namecheap.com/wordpress/
https://www.godaddy.com/hosting/wordpress-hosting
https://www.bluehost.com/wordpress
I think a lot of bloggers know that they want/need SSL, DDoS protection, and a CDN. I wouldn't confuse bloggers with the lowest common denominator general public.
Let's not put on our rose colored glasses and mistake the classic world wide web for something that didn't need a decent amount of knowledge to setup even in the plain HTML days.
A number of WYSIWYG blogging providers in that day (Xanga, LiveJournal) were not interoperable and basically shut down and erased your dat.
If you were using a website host like Geocities or something of that sort you needed to have some level of HTML coding knowledge or were using some very limited site builder tools.
And I would also say that the WYSIWYG blogging tools that are still out there are far more flexible than your typical closed wall social media platform. Services like Blogger and Medium have full export functionality as a part of their platforms.
For each blogger who knows what SSL, DDoS and CDN is, there are a hundred people who write their articles and publish them on Facebook to thousands of followers and millions of views. Or do they not count as bloggers?
If we look at the print world, the definition of an author is somebody who writes articles or books. He doesn't have to know how to operate any other machine than a typewriter. Whether he knows how to operate a printing mill has no importance when judging the quality of his penmanship. So why do hackers insist that people who are not Linux server admins do not count as real bloggers?
> And I would also say that the WYSIWYG blogging tools that are still out there are far more flexible than your typical closed wall social media platform. Services like Blogger and Medium have full export functionality as a part of their platforms.
Yes, they are excellent. And much better solutions for non-developers than self hosting WordPress.
This is again "if you don't know how to bore out a cylinder you don't deserve to drive".
This is not a simple process for normal people: https://ghost.org/docs/install/ubuntu/
That's exactly my point, so I agree completely with what you say. The article as well as a lot of people on HN insist that normal people should self host their stuff instead of using social media and proprietary, and I say that it's really not possible or desirable for them.
Ubuntu 20.04 or Ubuntu 22.04
NGINX (minimum of 1.9.5 for SSL)
A supported version of Node.js
MySQL 8
Systemd
A server with at least 1GB memory
A registered domain name"
Do you think a normal person has any idea what the above is or how to set it up?
I like Ghost, but this is like a mechanic saying "bore out the cylinder". Non-developers will have a very hard time setting up a self-hosted Ghost blog. That's why the proprietary Ghost platform exists, which is an excellent choice.
Thousands of people run blogs on WordPress, but billions of people express themselves through social media. Because self-hosting is a nightmare unless it's your job to work with sys admin stuff.
I will suggest a solution that would let normal people easily host and own their own blog without being sys admins or developers:
A "Blog" app that you could get in the App Store on your iPad. Set-up includes deciding a domain name and paying for it with Apple Pay. Then start writing posts and pressing publish, everything taken care of out of sight, with built in hosting that you pay for monthly. If the user so pleases, they could activate features such as paid memberships or publishing to search engines, taken care of in the background by the "Blog" service. It could also include community features like social media, which could be moderated like social media – with the difference that they can't take down your blog.
Normal people would be able to use this and focus on being creative and not on lint error or PHP version.
You are asking how the average non-technical user should be able to blog without anything "proprietary" (hosted), without also setting anything up. The contradiction is that you can't want something to be self-hosted and also not expend any effort whatsoever towards it, self-hosted always required some knowledge of time and effort, and thus you correctly say that people should use something hosted. Your example itself is literally what Ghost does, (and you even say yourself that it's hosted) I don't see how it is any different or less "proprietary" than hosted Ghost.
Therefore, by the logic laid out by your own stipulations, your initial question actually would not have any logically valid answers. There is simply no platform that is not proprietary (hosted by your definition it seems) that also does not require any knowledge or setup.
I will insist that it is possible to make a solution where it's easy for people to host and publish without having to make a big effort and still retaining ownership. Why does no web host offer this as an app for example? Download an app to my iPad, pay for the subscription and domain, start writing. No setting up DNS or SSL, etc.
In the old days, hosting would be included with your ISP, and even if it wasn't super user friendly, it was much easier than it is today: Here's your folder, here's your username and password, use an FTP app to upload files to the folder.
Assuming the user owns a computer and a printer:
1. Open Microsoft Word or Apple Pages (either of these comes pre-installed on most consumer devices).
2. Write your articles.
3. Check that the printer has paper.
4. Print.
Millions of normal people are using computers and printing their documents every day, this is not a problem for them.
> Writing a book and getting it published?
1. Open Pages
2. Write your book
3. File menu -> Publish on Apple Books...
They even have a nice tutorial:
https://authors.apple.com/support/4574-publish-book-from-web
> Effectively using billboards for an ad campaign?
This I don't know.