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.
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!
I used to prefer Plume because it's written in Rust, but, well, it seems like it isn't maintained right now, so WriteFreely is currently the better option
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.
i've been into gemini and similar tech - and i really love it! did actually consider it, although i'm not sure whether it's an obstace for less tech-savvy people to reach my content?
Hugo looks promising - especially since i'm somewhat critical of huge (js heavy), dynamic websites
I suppose promote it everywhere you can? I don't have experience with that. Probably Threads, the Shitter-site, FB, etc, if you have accounts. Anything where people can link something they liked.
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.
Use some static site generator like Hugo and host your files on a Github, S3 or any other static site hosting. For comments you can use disqus or whatever is popular nowadays.
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.