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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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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Can I please get the definition of ‘townie’ here? I don’t understand that word at all!
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Somebody who thinks writing is a civilized activity done by city dwellers
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What do you mean by townie-mode writing? I definitely fit the model of non-techie who decided to join a “cloudy” option (
@SubstackInc), but not sure what you mean with the writing style -
People with a mental model of writing as a civilized rather than wild frontier activity
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