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 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 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.
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Replying to
very interesting!
100% agree that PHP is cobol of web and CMSs are "dissolving" into the cloud (great metaphor that I'm going to steal)
I don't know how wide-spread this will get but there's strong resurgence of interest in independent blogs in tech communities as Medium dies.
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