The medium is the message. A thread on the future of blogging as a creative medium from the perspective of the evolution of the technology that drives it. Ie future as foreseeable via forcing function effects of the 800lb gorilla that is Wordpress.
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Gutenberg has the feel of a large corporate leap-forward vision though. The good part is that it’s a move to the future. The worrying part is that it looks a bit like Google Wave or Google+. Evolution by 5-Year Plan. Part self-disruption new game, part self-preservation endgame.
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But the fact that no true new “modern” challenger CMS has emerged in years, only platforms like Medium, and platformized-WordPress (http://Wordpress.com , WPengine which I use) suggests that the “CMS” era proper may be over. The backend has to be serverless now.
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Gutenberg is a bit of a Great Leap attempt on the frontend, but the backend will not so much leap as dissolve into the cloud. Not sure how that will work with aging PHP core, a 90s-era COBOL-of-the-web that is only worth keeping going at enormous cost because so much runs on it.
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I’ve often idly (and not too seriously) worried about PHP being the backend of WP. Now I think “backend” and “CMS” will cease to be meaningful before PHP grinds into obsolescence. Future: Shift a lot of the weight to the front-end, switch out the backend for a more cloudy one.
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At some point I suspect the “self-hosted” kind of Wordpress which many think of as “real” blogging — downloading/installing on your own server — will be a historical curiosity option. Like people running 8-bit DOS games in emulators. It is already no longer a serious option.
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Back when I used shared-server ISP (Dreamhost), they were pressing me to upgrade to a “personal server” (a VM basically). I saw that as a sign they’d eventually either charge for admin services or force you to admin a VM. Which is what you’d do today (likely on Digital Ocean)
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For those who’ve never run a serious site, this is the equivalent of having to self-checkout and bag your own groceries. Instead of just doing light admin on the specific website software, you’d do heavier admin: server OS upgrades, web server configuration etc. Not fun.
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So I sucked it up and moved to a 10x costlier solution in 2014. Instead of a $10/mo shared server, I ended up on a $100/mo managed WPengine account. Usually, I end up with $50-150/mo in overage charges since our traffic is above the band we’re in but not yet at next level
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Today the “self-hosted” alternative for ribbonfarm would probably be a $20/mo Digital Ocean droplet with 10x the admin time and knowledge than I needed to run things on Dreamhost in 2012. Basically out of the question. Cloudy app-level managed Wordpress is the only game in town.
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For a new blogger with no tech skills, I don’t think self-hosted Wordpress is an option at all. As an engineer, but not a s/w engineer, I at least had basic Unix shell and PHP scripting skills, and understood the basics of server-side infrastructure, enough for 2007 indie ops.
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Quite unsurprisingly many new, non-techie bloggers don’t even understand what self-hosted means. They don’t know there’s an open-source project behind http://Wordpress.com (a private platform run by Automattic, a private company) or what it means to run your own “copy”.
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It’s as bizarre-sounding to them as “running my own google or Facebook”. Their mental model of blogging is *communatarian by default* lacking even awareness of the individualist option, let alone seeing brave digital homesteading as the default, like we did 10 years ago.
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This has implications. It means only the more social/civilized type of writer, willing to *start* on a shared private community/aggregator environment like Medium or http://Wordpress.com , will get into blogging. Wild West pioneer-settler era is over. The townies are moving in.
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If I were starting out today instead of 2007, I’d probably not pick Wordpress or Medium. I’d probably have given up on the idea of writing in public altogether and my life would have taken a more traditional engineering career path. I just don’t enjoy townie-mode writing.
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Not just speculation. Ribbonfarm circa 2007 was my second start online. My first was a community e-zine, pre-blogging, in 1998-2000. When that got too social/communitarian and too full of townies, I quit. And didn’t write online again for 7 years.
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Another data point: I was active on Quora for a couple of years, and quit right when it was shifting gears from pioneer/settler to townie. Basically, I have a writing-centric life *only* because Wordpress was at the right stage of evolution when I got the itch.
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It was indie enough for me (unlike typepad or blogger), within my technical ability (unlike the old pre-blogging ezine era with its janky cgi-bin Perl scripts or the new cloud era with its self-checkout complexity)
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What does this mean? Unless someone comes up with tools that allow *new* bloggers to *cheaply* and with *low skill* run highly indie operations rather than platform sharecropping, the blogging frontier has closed. I give this a 5% chance of happening.
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The technical+cost barrier to entry is just too high and the platform options just too cheap/convenient. Those who got into Wordpress early enough or can do a higher-cost start now, will enter an end-game phase.
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I’m starting a series exploring where we go from here, as writers with pioneer/settler inclinations who don’t like large platform communities.https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/01/31/elderblog-sutra-1/ …
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End of conversation
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