Be A Property Owner And Not A Renter On The Internet

The year is 2025. The internet in the shape that we’ve known it in the early 2000s is no longer there. Or, not quite in the shape that we’ve seen it before. This is not just plain nostalgia talking - the vibrant ecosystem of blogs, feeds, personal sites, and forums has been usurped by a few mega-concentrated players.

Want to find a vibrant community around a very niche subject? It’s probably on Reddit. Or you know what - it could be Discord. Or both. Some still operate the occasional VBulletin on phpBB board, but that’s the minority. Want to buy or sell something? Your best bet is checking Facebook’s Marketplace (and of course, coordinate the purchase through Facebook’s Messenger, not email or any other means). Want to watch videos from some of your favorite makers? YouTube or bust. Anything outside of the ecosystem of these conglomerates is bound to naturally gain less visibility and it will be insanely less discoverable to large swaths of the population.

We’ve reached a point where, for quite a few folks, “the internet” is synonymous with “Facebook, Instagram, and Discord,” and if it’s not there, it might as well not exist. This shift introduces a range of problems, that we’ll talk about a bit more in this post.

I should also caveat the post with this disclaimer - the target audience here is people proficient with technology. For the vast majority of the population the suggestions I am going to be discussing are untenable in the current technological landscape, and that’s OK. My job is not to get every single person to build their content outside the popular networks but rather encourage those that were on the fence and able to make the jump into owning their own internet property rather than rent the space from someone who is not invested in their success.

Here we are #

Now, this blog post’s intent is not to get you to stop using all “BigCo” services or convince you that the products made by these companies are universally evil or bad. They’re not. Being able to reliably watch videos on any platform or browser is great. I use YouTube and I publish quite a few videos there. I also use Reddit to connect with folks that enjoy Halo because there is no other place where that community hangs out. There are things that are simply done better when there is proper funding and a full-time staff working every day to maintain the infrastructure at scale, especially when talking about non-niche domains. That means that by default most people will not try to do this themselves. And they shouldn’t.

Running infrastructure for yourself is hard. Running infrastructure for others is exponentially harder. As any forum moderator or administrator can attest, the sheer volume of spam, abuse, and just generally trash behavior can wear down even the most seasoned veterans of the .com era. And that’s if we’re talking about communities that host tens of thousands of users. Scale that to a few million and there won’t be enough hours in the day to either keep the servers running (stuff is costly too) or to monitor the content for anything potentially harmful or inappropriate.

For anyone that wants to start a community, it’s a no-brainer that they should probably start somewhere where they can “outsource” the hard things, like moderation and infrastructure, to someone who is an expert and has built-in mechanisms to handle everything in-house. Especially when the funds for this are at or around zero dollars. That’s a totally reasonable stance to take, and I absolutely get the rationale there.

Not only that, but a lot of the existing ecosystems rest on the shoulders of network effects. Once everyone you care about is on Reddit, are you really going to be the only one not on Reddit and try to bootstrap your own little corner for a specific community? Probably not, and attracting people there would be much harder. Reddit is the one-stop-shop - I can go there for woodworking advice, but I can also chat in local communities, or communities around collecting stamps, with the same account and within the same interface. Are you really going to post photos of your fridge that you want to sell on your blog and hope that in a year someone discovers it through a Google search? Of course not - you will go to Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist and get it sold within a few days.

You, the user, are going to go where most people are, because you’re optimizing for solving your problems, such as finding like-minded individuals or selling the fridge quickly and getting it out of your garage to make room for a table saw. Most people are this way - they don’t care who or how maintains or runs a community or network as long as that place solves the problems they set out to solve. When that goal overlaps with the company’s desire to make money, you end up in somewhat of a goldilocks zone, but that’s typically a short-lived experience with modern services. More on that shortly.

Knowing all this doesn’t mean that we should automatically absolve these companies from one very insidious thing that creeps up on us over time - being locked into walled gardens. If the last decade has shown us anything, it’s that a lot of these ecosystems are poorly suited to keep the interest of the user in mind for the long run. It all boils down to the fact that major platforms over time are usually interested in:

1. Constant growth (both monetary and engagement), at all costs. Ads are, quite literally, everywhere. YouTube is fighting tooth and nail (the irony of linking to Reddit is not lost on me) to prevent you, the user, from being able to block ads. AI-generated slop is going to make its way into comments and descriptions - arguably, things that nobody really asked for, but you’re going to get them anyway. Facebook and Instagram will soon have “AI users” (whatever shape that’s going to take) to help “boost engagement.” The platforms are not interested in helping you, the customer, in easier and more robust communication with your family and friends. They want you to “engage” and drive the ad dollar revenue up.
2. Keeping you within their walls and give you few chances to leave. Twitter doesn’t care about the fact that you poured your heart and soul in that one blog post and wanted to share it with your community. You post a link - you get downranked. Because that will cause people to actually leave Twitter to read your thinking, and that means they won’t be able to scroll through an ad-ridden feed. You ever wonder why Instagram doesn’t really let you post links? Yeah.
3. Maximizing your attention and time within the ecosystem. Engagement bait is everywhere, and the more engagement - the better! Why bubble up someone’s real thoughts and work when instead you can push up more AI slop that will get people angry, upset, and more likely to engage on your platform (the AI slop problem will get worse, but don’t worry, it will be “a whole new category of content”)?
4. Hoovering up data about you. You can’t even browse a community without an account. Want to see someone’s photo feed on Instagram? Better be ready to sign up, or only see the latest few photos, with a persistent nag screen telling you to log in. Want to browse Facebook Marketplace for that homelab gear you’ve been looking for? Tough luck, you need a Facebook account to see listings, even if you’re not going to buy anything (contrast that to Craigslist). Want to see what a particular hobby community is chatting about? Discord doesn’t allow anonymous browsing, so once again - you need to create an account. Once you log in, there is now clear attribution of everything you do to an account. uBlock Origin and Pi-hole can do a good job at blocking quite a few privacy-invading things, but they do nothing to prevent server-side telemetry collection that tracks your behavior on every page within the platform. Facebook knows exactly how long you spent browsing Marketplace before making a purchase, and in which area you live based on your history. Reddit can tell what you’re interested in based on the communities you browse and tailor ads based on that. Your profile is being built, and then sold (or “shared”) to a myriad of unscrupulous data brokers.
5. Exploiting user-generated content. For example, when you upload an image to Instagram, you’re not transferring ownership rights to your creation to Meta, but you do give them a license to use the content - a “non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content.” Neat! Your art might end up in an ad you did not consent to, but you still retain the copyright. Or they might train their AI on it, who knows.

The more walled gardens grow, the more the interest of the user fades, replaced by a strong drive for monetization and growth. So, why are these companies not keeping the interest of the user in mind, though, if the users are the ones actually building the communities? If it wouldn’t be for the users on those platforms wouldn’t those platforms disappear overnight, a fate that MySpace and Digg know a bit to well? Well, in the words of the modern philosopher Dave Chappelle:

Almost with no exceptions, you, the user, are unfortunately the product for social networks of any kind. And that’s not necessarily malice, but just a core design principle of walled gardens, applied generously as they grow. Walled gardens often start with good intentions, but once a critical mass of users settles, there is a strong desire to ensure that those users stick around and can produce a return on investment - those hosting bills aren’t going to pay themselves. That means that a lot of anti-user patterns will slowly start to emerge (not all at once, though), limiting the control over the experience, and by proxy, the benefits to its inhabitants. Say, at first posts with links will be deprioritized. Then, instead of showing your content in a chronological feed for your followers, your content will be shown at the mercy of a black box algorithm. Then, “premium” users will get boosted while non-paying users will be left to linger somewhere at the bottom of the discoverability stack. Before you know it, the oh-so-kind ecosystem that gave you an audience starts being hostile to you unless you pony up or play to the algorithm’s fiddle ("Hey, how about making your thumbnails a bit more clickbait-y to drive some engagement?").

At that point, the meta-goal is to serve the company, not you. You’re already hooked, and can’t move away without losing access to the network you built over the years. That’s a losing proposition for most people. Even looking at recent examples such as the massive exodus to Bluesky from Twitter required some extremely strong headwinds to emerge for that to happen, and it’s still unclear how permanent this change will be.

Jeff Atwood had a good post about this phenomenon all the way back in 2007. Who knew that little would change for close to two decades. And as the situation required, Cory Doctorow has astutely coined the term that captures what is happening - “enshittification.” A product whose success is predicated on its ability to constantly grow may start with somewhat altruistic aspirations, but it inevitably will reach a point where the owners will need to make money off of its users, and that’s when the service will start turning the screws for the worse, with no way to escape without adverse effects. We’re at that point with basically every ecosystem I mentioned above.

We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we can’t leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere, all while showing us how happy we should be with the limitations imposed on us.

Advice that is not helpful #

A huge part of the problem here is that, even in my framing, I am thinking like a person that works in tech and enjoys dabbling with technology. I host my blog. I self-host my data. I use a static site generator instead of a vanilla Wix or WordPress instance. I know my way around the terminal and can do a npm run to see what my site looks like before I push it to production. But I am not like most people. Not because I am special, but because most people literally couldn’t care less about the infrastructure, tools, privacy implications, or the fact that their content is not visible without an account.

That’s why I find advice like this useless:

Well of course it’s better to host your own blog! Also, while you’re at it, put your Mastodon server in a DigitalOcean droplet, throw some Cloudflare CDN in front of it, run your own Raspberry Pi to monitor uptime, and you’re golden! Oh, and don’t forget to also make sure to log into the droplet every once in a while to update the container, do an occasional database migration, and ensure that you check the logs for intrusions.

This is about as helpful as someone recommending switching to Linux to someone who wants to improve their privacy posture (skip /r/privacy for your own sanity, by the way). Ask me why I used this analogy. You missed the forest for the trees.

No person that doesn’t work in tech (and many people that do) wants to deal with any of this. For most of us, we have a million other things we’d rather do in our life than stand up our own infrastructure to host a blog that gets 50 visits a month from our friends or family, or maintain a Mastodon server that you get charged for monthly to post random thoughts to a few hundred followers. It’s easier to just publish that as a long-form LinkedIn post. It’s easier to share the video on YouTube and not host it yourself on some web page and pay for the bandwidth of a multi-gigabyte MP4 file.

Most people are perfectly content with everything living inside their Facebook account because it’s convenient and their family and friends are already there. Telling everyone to learn how git and GitHub Pages work to host their blog is not an effective way to drive change. But that’s also not the point. As I mentioned earlier, the goal is to start with a small niche community of people who are comfortable with building their own digital corners.

What can we do #

The point I am trying to drive home is that we shouldn’t build our castle in someone else’s kingdom.

Do not give full control of your content to the platforms that see you as a resource to be used to grow their own metrics. Here are a few rules that I set for myself, that I hope you also find helpful in making sure that you are a property owner on the internet rather than a mere renter in someone’s building. This is heavily inspired by the “Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms” blog post by Chris Zukowski, with a few extensions that I amended from my own experience.

The items below also assume that you’re OK spending a bit of money and time on establishing your more durable presence online. There are, of course, free options, but anything free usually comes with quite a few strings attached that can put you in the same position I argued against above.

1. Have your own property on the web #

Buy a domain and host your own website. It really doesn’t matter what you use for either the domain purchase or the hosting, as long as it’s your property. You can start with any of the site builders, host your own blog engine, or even use a static site generator like me. But as long as you have your own stake in the ground, you’re off to a good start. You don’t even need to be super technically proficient for this - platforms like Squarespace simplify this process quite a bit. And this is just one of them.

The domain registrar and the website host are entirely transparent to your friends and customers. If at some point your host decides to do something silly, you can take your website and move it elsewhere. Domains can be moved to other registrars too. You get quite a bit of flexibility there. Compare it to having all your eggs in the Twitter basket - if a new owner decides to take it in a direction you don’t agree with, and everyone leaves for Bluesky, you can’t take your Twitter followers and move them over. You’ll be forced to start from scratch.

In contrast, if at some point you want to change who hosts your site or which mail provider you use for your newsletter (thankfully emails are independent entities that can work on any platform), as Chris put it in the aforementioned blog post, your customers “[…] will still go to the same URL to get to your site, they will still receive your newsletter from your email address.”

I am sure there are places where I should not host my content, no? What am I optimizing for here, exactly?

I would recommend avoiding any places where there is content lock-in. You want to optimize for future portability. That is, if you can’t easily export your full content history (e.g., blog posts) and move them somewhere else, don’t use that service. If your content is locked into a service, and at some point that service decides that you are no longer a wanted customer, all that effort you put into making it available to your customers can vanish on a moment’s notice. Prefer sites that allow you to publish in open formats, such as Ghost.

If you are going to use a service where the content is stored in a proprietary format that you can’t easily access wholesale, always maintain your own copy and export the hosted content regularly. You should be able to recover it on a new site shall anything happen to your current site.

What about the top-level domain (TLD)? Are there any particular things I need to consider before registering my own domain? Should I seek out a .com or is .xyz OK to use as well?

Great reminder! Yes, pick a TLD with a generally positive reputation and future durability! You want to make sure that both your registrar and registry are entities that can be more-or-less trusted to not disappear overnight. Any of the traditional .com, .net, or .org are great. .dev, like this blog is using, is good too. Certain country-specific TLDs (called ccTLDs, for “country code top-level domains”) are great as well, such as .ca for Canada (you need to be a Canadian permanent resident or citizen to register, though) or .eu for the European Union (although be aware that if a country does leave the EU, like when the UK went through the Brexit saga, you’d need to migrate off of the TLD). TLDs such as .xyz, .io, or .zip (yes, it’s real, and it’s not spectacular) can be a bit more dicey due to things like association with spam content, dependence on new political developments, and just general mistrust. That’s not to say that you should never use them, but do prefer more established TLDs when possible.

As a best-practice, I would also highly recommend the separation of concerns in terms of where you have your domain and where you host your content. If you host your content with Cloudflare, don’t register the domain there - keep it on a registrar like Porkbun or Namecheap. That way if your account is terminated by the host for whatever reason, you’re not left holding the bag because you can’t even access your domain to point to another host.

Oh yeah, and while I am at it - if you’re curious to see other places on the web where people established their homes, check out BlogScroll.

2. Never concentrate all your work around one network #

If you want to get your work seen in the modern era, it’s very likely that you have to use one of existing social networks with a significant user mass.

Speaking from my own experience, YouTube is doing a moderately good job at making sure that folks discover my video content where I interview guests for my podcast. But at the same time, I still host the podcast on my own site. The audio and video for the podcast is available for download to anyone, even if they are not on YouTube, and folks can find it on other aggregators as well. When I talk about the podcast, I don’t just bank on YouTube to bring eyes to my content - I talk about in on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and even Mastodon. And within the recorded episodes, I refer people to theworkitem.com as the destination they should check out for more content, not any of the networks. They can find pointers to those from the website.

This coming year, I will be integrating newsletters on both my blog and podcast because I’d like to build a way to connect directly to my audience without any middlemen. The mail provider is irrelevant because emails are universal and can be easily transferred between vendors on an as-needed basis.

Build that graph of diversified sources that have your personal site as the final destination for those that want to follow your adventures. Your site can feed those with new audience members, and vice-versa.

You also want to ensure that your site can contribute to audience growth on channels where folks are concentrated - if someone stumbles across your blog post on Hacker News, make it easy for them to find out that you are also on Mastodon or other networks where that visitor might already hang out. Decoupling from the influence of a single network ensures that you build a bit of resilience into your audience and content visibility.

The gist of this is simple - make sure that you’re not overly-focused on building an audience on just one channel, as any single point of failure can be catastrophic. As with everything in life (including finances and interpersonal relationships), diversification is key. Use Facebook, but also make sure that folks can find you on Bluesky. Sharing photo highlights on Instagram? Great, share them in a photo album on your blog as well and add a story behind it with a few links about the place you took the photo from.

This is also why I love that podcasts survived to this day in their proper RSS feed glory - no network can claim that they own the concept of a podcast. I can listen to my favorite podcasts on any of the available podcast apps because they’re just audio files linked in a XML file. That’s it. That’s as open as it gets. Anyone can host the files anywhere, and the feed itself can be created by anyone. And while I am certain that services like Spotify will continue to try to build a walled garden around the podcast ecosystem by having folks publish Spotify-exclusive shows or integrate Spotify-specific features that are not available across other podcast apps, I am happy to see that so far these efforts failed to gain any traction outside a few shows. The vast majority of podcasts live on an open network, and I can listen to them without a Spotify account.

And by the way, when I talk about using the existing social channels as a top of the audience funnel, feel zero shame about this tactic - remember when Facebook themselves built a “bridge bot” to funnel the MySpace network into their ecosystem?

Facebook addressed this problem by giving MySpace users who switched to Facebook a bridge between the two services. Simply give this tool your MySpace login and password, and it would use a bot to login to your MySpace account, scrape all the waiting messages in your queues and inbox, and push them into your Facebook feed. You could reply to these, and the bot would log back into MySpace and post those replies as you.

Be as self-interested in growing your space as major networks are in growing theirs. Thankfully, despite the centralization, we also have a huge diversity of tools that enable you to do all sorts of nice things around your property, like mailing lists (Buttondown, Mailchimp, and Kit come to mind) and monetization systems (such as Stripe, Patreon, or Gumroad).

3. Don’t treat external networks as link farms #

Everything I am saying here can be interpreted as “post your content on your site, treat social networks like link farms to drive traffic to your site” and that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Social media accounts that just post out-of-context links are of no interest to me and vast majority of people you probably care about. If I see an account do just that, it’s an instant unfollow. If I wanted just links I’d subscribe to a RSS feed. Funnily enough, this kind of behavior has been the downfall of a lot of “walled-off” communities that I’ve been a part of on Slack and Discord - people would use them to self-promote their blogs and other content, and it all became useless because on every visit, I’d see one hundred links with exactly zero conversation around it. That’s not the way to go.

Use other channels to meaningfully engage with the community. Answer their questions. Ask for feedback. Build rapport. You are building a community, not flooding the zone with self-promoting content. This will allow you to steer them to places that are more favorable to nurturing and growing your audience long-term.

4. If possible, build the core of your value in your own yard rather than someone else’s #

I’ve seen this tactic applied by a few folks on YouTube and I think it’s brilliant. Say, you’re someone known for teaching people how to use CSS, JavaScript, or anything else. You post some content on YouTube, but make sure to promote the heck out of the courses that you manage on your own site (including monetization). This way, you skip the need to depend on a large network for your income entirely - you still maintain it as a top-of-funnel channel, but the core is on your own turf. You own the distribution while the “marketing” channels are nothing other than “plug-ins” in your system. You still want them to be reliable, but you’re not worried about one of them going offline.

5. A mailing list with 1,000 members is better than a social media account with 10,000 followers #

This article is sprinkled with this idea, but to make it clear again - email is a universal protocol that you can take with you no matter where you go. If you have a mailing list of 1,000 community members that are interested in what you have to say, you can keep that forever (or, until they unsubscribe). A social media account can go “poof” in a week because the CEO decided that you’re not worth promoting anymore. Substack not to your liking? No problem - you take the emails and move them to Buttondown. Can’t quite do the same with an audience on any social network.

Anecdotally, people that entrusted you with their email address are also significantly more invested in reading/watching/listening to your content than an amalgam of followers across the social network landscape, but that could be recency bias.

Always lean towards open and portable standards.

6. Always give people ways to get to the home you own #

Wrote a blog post? Don’t just copy and paste the entirety of the content as a LinkedIn post. Post an extract, and then a link to your site. Sharing a new podcast episode? Instead of linking to the YouTube video in your LinkedIn post promoting it, link to the episode page on your website, where people can see how to subscribe on their favorite podcast app, read through the episode transcript, or even check out the resources a guest might’ve shared. The ecosystems I talked about in this post should be your top-of-funnel for your audience.

Yes, some of your posts might be downranked, but that’s OK, because some of them won’t. I’ve seen people share my content on Bluesky and LinkedIn as a link, and it drove quite a few folks into my email inbox with suggestions, feedback, and ideas. Have links to your websites in your bio or anywhere where the networks allow you to customize things.

This is not about isolating yourself from the major networks, but rather using them to your advantage. My content lives in my home, and if you want to see more of it - come on over to den.dev.

7. Maintain your home #

If your building is overgrown with weeds, the sidewalk is cracked (congratulations, you have a tripping hazard), and the insides are covered in dust, the likelihood of quality visitors will decrease. The same applies to your internet property.

If you want to build an audience that keeps consistently coming back, make sure that your website, blog, portfolio, or photo gallery is in good shape. It doesn’t need to be pixel-perfect, but it needs to show that the author is still there, and there is a reason to stop by. If you post everything to YouTube, link to your site, and the site’s last content update was in 2004, that doesn’t inspire confidence that whoever found you on YouTube should also check out your blog - they’ll just see you on YouTube.

8. Enable your audience to engage with you in an open forum #

As much as I yearn for the era of proper forums to come back, it might be a lost war at scale. But I don’t need to win the war - I want to engage with a niche audience of folks that care about what I build. For that, as much as possible, leverage tools that foster open engagement that can be discoverable and indexable. Discourse is a fantastic option. If you’re on a budget, integrate comments as GitHub issues on your blog with the help of Utterances, like you see here, on den.dev.

The latter has been particularly great for my blog. On one occasion I had a very long chat with a community member about Halo film format reverse engineering - all easily available to anyone in the future.

Avoid locking in your community into a Discord, Slack, or any other proprietary and hidden service that keeps your content locked in.

9. Don’t worry about full control #

Having your own corner of the internet is not some kind of “purity test” where you need to set up an Apache server from scratch, host your mail server, or maintain your own homegrown static site generator running on seventeen generations of Gentoo Linux.

At some point, you will have to depend on other systems and let go of full control. You might use Azure for hosting, Porkbun for domains, a Cloudflare CDN for your images, GitHub for your content backups, AWS S3 for larger files, and so on. I am by no means trying to push you to build your garage server and deal with all the things that come with that decision.

The goal is to give you an opportunity to build something that you have full control of with a good degree of flexibility, all while using off-the-shelf tools and services. None of the services or tools are guaranteed future-proof. Just like extreme circumstances can result in you losing your purchased house (the analogy falls apart in that the government would pay for the property in Eminent Domain cases, but you get the idea), the same can happen with online properties. But it still offers much greater flexibility than depending on some third-party platform to keep your interest at the forefront of their plans.

10. Incremental is better than perfect #

Your site is not going to be perfect from day one. You are going to run into hiccups with discoverability. You’ll find out that nobody can find it on Google for the first month. That’s OK. You can pull through this. Keep writing and posting about things you learned, things you saw, or things you’ve otherwise experienced. Document your process. Share your notes. Write up your brain dump from this weekend’s brainstorm.

Grow your digital garden. With every sentence, every word, every photo published, it will become more interesting to others who will discover it later.

Conclusion #

I hope that the above inspired you to seek out a way to get your own lot on the web and build your house on it. Not everyone will do that, and not everyone needs to. But, the more the indie web space grows around those that can invest the time and effort, the more vibrant our own ecosystem becomes, and what is the web without a vibrant ecosystem.

Now wait a second. You just said "indie web" and this entire post rung a bell. Aren't you talking about Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE)?

Indeed I am! A lot of what I talked about above is inspired by and based on POSSE. Own your URLs!

Recommended reading #

• Your words are wasted by Scott Hanselman.
• The ever-increasing walled gardenness of Twitter by Annoying Technology.
• /u/spez is right about feudalism and that’s why reddit as we know it is doomed by maya.land.
• Cinch.fm mobile audio service shuts down, demonstrates troubles of when you bet on services you don’t control by Robert Scoble.
• Blogodammerung? by Tim Bray.

Discussion #

Besides the GitHub comments on this blog post, you can participate in the discussion on Hacker News.