As we head into the new year (Happy New Year! 🥳), hot on the heels of my own decision to re-commit to a personal blog and owning my own content, The Verge has posted an interesting article called Bring back personal blogging. One section addressed owning your own content and platform:
If what is happening on Twitter hasn’t demonstrated it, our relationship with these social media platforms is tenuous at best. The thing we are using to build our popularity today could very well be destroyed and disappear from the internet tomorrow, and then what?
What happens to all the content you have created? Where will the archive of all your funny memes and jokes be? What is going to happen to all those selfies you felt cute in but didn’t delete later?
The answer is we don’t know because we don’t control Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok). If one of these companies decided to shut down their service permanently, there would be nothing we could do about it.
Owning your content and controlling your platform is essential, and having a personal blog is a great way to do that.
This absolutely resonated with me and I believe many others are beginning to wrestle with this as well. The challenge, in my eyes, is creating an easy path for users without technical knowledge to do it.
Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web. Tell your stories, build your community, and talk to your people. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to duplicate any space that already exists on the web — in fact, it shouldn’t. This is your creation. It’s your expression. It should reflect you.
I wholeheartedly agree. Yet again, this is much easier said than done. I suppose a product like Squarespace makes this pretty easy, especially now that it provides the means to secure your own domain all in one place? Will something like Micro.blog take off?
First of all, this isn't the first time it's been predicted that personal blogs will be making a comeback, so take this with a grain of salt. But if it does (or maybe, in order for it to), I think it would require the process to become easier.