With the arrival of a new Twitter Overlord, some users feel uneasy as they realize they may have to pay to be verified, and that the visibility of the content they put on the platform could depend on a paid subscription.

This is a good opportunity to remind us that blogs are cooler than ever, and that "social networks" are mostly "ad networks".

I encourage authors to store their content primarily on their own blog. Social networks can be used to reach different publics.

Here are my blogging requirements:

As a result, readers do not have to open an account, nor accept terms and conditions. They don’t have to install a mobile app. They access my content with open protocols. They can use a browser or a RSS client of their choice. No Mark and no Elon to manipulate my articles' visibility, or to stalk and track visitors. No risk of new, sour rules down the line.

On the other end, I remain in control of my data. If I want to change my hosting provider (AWS, Heroku, Railway…​), it is transparent to the reader as I retain my domain name.

In practice, my tech-intensive solution involves content written in markdown, a static blog generator (hugo), my own domain name and any static hosting.

This setup is not for the faint-hearted though. Some technical knowlege required.

Writing in markdown is actually the easy part. You need to learn a few symbols for formatting and off you go. For instance, # for a title and ## for a subtitle. The following text:

The *quick* brown fox jumped **over**
the lazy [dog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog).

becomes

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

After a short learning period, you may actually find it even more convenient than other formats.

Then, static blog generation and hosting require advanced technical knowledge and honestly, can be a pain in the neck. A compromise would be to use a service like Ghost. I haven’t tested it though. And yes, you need to pay for the hosting and the service, as you should.

Comments are the difficult part. Many years and many ago, I used Disqus. The new GDPR made me realize they had not communicated at all only a couple months before it would come into force. I decided to ditch them, and for my peace of mind, to get rid of comments altogether. I didn’t want to host the comments myself (too much spam and hassle). Ask yourself: do I really need to allow comments?

To sum it up:

It won’t be as easy as posting on Medium for instance, but in return, you get complete control, and you avoid the inevitable disappointment when you realise your articles are no longer really your articles after you publish them on a predatory platform.