What's a cool publishing medium for text-based posts nowadays?
What's a cool publishing medium for text-based posts nowadays?
i'm looking for a place/means/medium for texts that i write. content is essays on topics that i find worthy writing about with hints towars philosophy (i guess).
twenty years ago the right answer to my question would have been a (we-)blog - what's the current day equivalent for such a venture?
optimally, a solution would neither be based on lock-ins, data collection/aggregation or other shady business and would be freely (e.g. in a web browser, no login/registration required) and easily accessible.
Wordpress recently started offering fediverse federation. That it exists is the sum total of what I know about it, but I can see the potential.
WordPress is still the best option IMO. The software and ecosystem are very mature and as you say they're friendly to the fediverse too
i used wordpress for over a decade but left last year when the AI hype started ramping up and there were reports that even selecting the option to turn off post scraping doesn't work because the bots blocked by the site's robots.txt doesn't update.
basically: wordpress doesn't let you control AI scraping so is it still the best platform those of us worried about that are gonna be able to find?
Writefreely is a fantastic option. Your posts and profile integrate perfectly with the Fediverse right out of the box, it's nice to look at and really nice to use. It's also FOSS. RSS is supported by default. If you want to tinker with it you can add custom CSS and it's self-hostable. I host my own instance and it's by far the simplest & easiest federated software I've run. An absolute peach - highly recommend!
WriteFreely and Plume are based on ActivityPub and can be followed from the Fediverse (in addition to RSS of course)
Something really weird and interesting is Gemini Gemlogs. Technically not WWW, but still an internet platform.
Something more normal and accessible is Hugo.
ClassicPress is WordPress without Gutenberg, if you're used to that interface. It was based on 4.9 but now on current releases.
Whatever Molly White uses for https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ is something she wrote and was available on one of her accounts.
I'm looking for a similar thing that absolutely excludes all scraping, bots, search engines, etc. I think the only way we get the web back is cordoning the leeches off to one side. Let them drown in each other's AI regurgitation.
Still a blog. Host your own Wordpress or Ghost blog. Substack and others are evil.
but how do i gain reach? should i just advertise on lemmy/fediverse and hope to get traction?
It's very cheap and easy to do with static HTML files hosted on S3. But of course, that requires using AWS, which means Amazon, which means corporate evil. You would have complete control over it, though. It can also be slow to propagate any changes, so you'll want to get your pages right before uploading them. You can update them, it just takes a long time to get pushed everywhere. That part is pretty annoying, but it is very inexpensive.
is a text based, massively interlinked website that predates Wikipedia.
The topics(nodes) range from non-fiction informational to philosophical musings.
Will need an account to add nodes.
this looks very interesting! any pointers on how to (get) use(d to) it?
Nope, I've never posted, just remember it as a huge trove with a decent vibe.
Pretty sure it is just: create account and post.
I think some people add a CC licence to their works.
This has all the starter info:
https://everything2.com/node/e2node/An Introduction to Everything2
https://everything2.com/title/Everything2+Help
The gridbox shown at the bottom of each page, shows the nodes related to the page you are on.
Modern equivalent to blogs would probably be vlogs (videos on tiktok or other platforms like that)
Blogs are still a thing, check out WordPress.org
Another option is publishing on a place like medium.com
None of the above are optimal regarding your concerns about data collection, etc.
To address that, you could just set up your own personal website, if you don't mind learning how to do it
i already know how to create my own website - i'm just curious whether that's (still) the best option
If you implement activitypub somehow it would be great. If you intend on allowing comments I'd love to be able to do it from an existing fedi acct.
I heard substack was a new medium.com so it might be worth taking a look.
Substack is a safe harbour for actual Nazis and they refuse to do anything about it.
Everyone should avoid that site like the plague, and encourage anyone they know using it to do the same
I tried to create a blog on substack once, I got literally zero views across a few posts. I feel like the only blogs there that get recommended are by people who are already semi-famous, suggesting the usual problem of recommendation algorithms killing entry for new creators. It also strongly encourages a paid model, you also usually have to subscribe to comment on others' posts which makes it hard to get your blog out there. I'd say it's more a publishing platform for people who are already well known than for ordinary people.