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.
Conversation
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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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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Medium was always a sub-par experience for tech blogging as it doesn't have easy way to add code.
It's still fairly technical to get a Gatsby blog going but a number of tech folks are jumping in e.g. with his blog overreacted.io
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We're introducing themes soon which will drop the expertise/cost needed to get started even further.
gatsbyjs.org/blog/2019-01-3
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you would be better to focus on ForestryIO style editing and easier tool chain.
Step 1 of grokking Gatsby is understanding React (aka be a developer).
Real devs hate Liquid - but it was designed for designers to safely style e-commerce.
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Yeah themes aren't enough by themselves. Their goal is to reduce or eliminate need to know react or other parts of our stack. For most people, you'll want to pair a theme with Forest or one of the dozens of CMSs Gatsby integrates with
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which doesn’t get you to indie blogging. Forestry is great. How do I run my own Forestry locally? Fully integrated into Gatsby.
(Not that you have to go in this direction - but that’s the niche WP occupies, a full stack)
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The next thing seen as the soul of “indie writing” may not necessarily be seen as blogging. Perhaps people will write more wiki-like works with weak temporal ordering and stronger linkage
Hmm. In fact by medium-is-message, there might even be an aesthetic reaction against blogging. Static sites may become preferred medium of antibloggers in some sense. Reverse all the norms of blogging.
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yep! I have been enjoying my personal wiki farming.
IPFS has content addressing at its core, not URIs. This has been breaking my brain.
Atomic content where all metadata — including your brand / identity — needs to be included.
Domains are identity. Post domain identity???
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Huh interesting, that takes the idea to a logical extreme. Has any content application built on top of ipfs been launched yet? How do they use crypto features?
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