Own the place you post from

I stopped putting things online years ago. I used to have a blog. I used to post photos on Instagram, links on Facebook, videos on YouTube. At some point I just stopped, and it took me a long time to work out why. None of those places ever felt like mine. They kept changing, and every change was somebody else’s decision about what my things were for.

That is the whole argument, really. A profile is a room you rent by the minute from a landlord who keeps moving the furniture. Sometimes the rearrangement is harmless. Sometimes your archive quietly stops being reachable, or the feed decides that what you make is worth showing to eleven people this month. You are not being punished. You are just not the customer.

The usual objection is that a personal website is work. It used to be. I set this one up in a day. It is four small static sites, a few Markdown files, and a small server that costs me roughly the price of two coffees a month. There is no database, no CMS, no admin panel, no login. When I want to publish something I write a file and run one command.

What I got for that is small and, I think, worth more than it sounds. Nothing here measures you. There is no view count for me to check, which means there is nothing for me to optimise toward, which means the only remaining question about anything I make is whether I wanted to make it. That question turns out to be much harder and much better than the alternative.

The other thing I got is a feed. Three of them, actually. You can subscribe without giving me an email address, without making an account, and without me ever learning that you did. A feed reader asks a static file for updates and the static file cannot tell one reader from another. That is not a privacy feature I added. It is just what happens when nobody is trying to build a funnel.

I am not going to pretend this replaces anything. The people are still on the platforms and I will probably keep posting there too. But the things I actually care about will live here first, at an address I control, in a format I can move somewhere else the day this stops working.

If you want to exist online, have somewhere to exist. Rent a room if you like. Just do not confuse it with having a home.