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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Replying to @vgr
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 style1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @MarksBrainwaves @SubstackInc
People with a mental model of writing as a civilized rather than wild frontier activity
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Replying to @vgr
Is your writing influenced by its proximity to townie writing?
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Still not sure if I get the townie concept – I just started writing on a public site so I could practice crafting my thoughts with some sort of accountability
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