But it doesn’t have to go down. Imagine you started your blog on substack years ago, when substack was just a scrappy startup and now, years later, you discover it’s actually a shitty nazi bar. You pack your stuff, download a copy of your content, delete your account and move somewhere else.
All those old URLs are gone. You have no way to 301 them to your new location. And sure, you technically can maintain a list of all the people who have linked to your site and email them to let them know your content now lives at a different location.
What if those people don’t bother updating those links? How about all the people who have links to your posts saved as bookmarks for example? How about all the people you don’t even know have links to your site? What if your blog is famous and there are tens of thousands links scattered everywhere? How about links that are printed in books and magazines?
Renting a domain name for a fee might not be the perfect solution, but it’s by far better than the alternative.
For me, “content” in the context of the web, means some piece of data found at a location. Those two are linked together. And if you only control one half of that, then, to me, it means you don’t control your content.
That’s how I see it. But different people might have different opinions, that’s totally ok. But this is why I stress that no matter what people do, no matter which platforms they want to use, they should get a domain name, ideally one that’s “stable“, and not a crazy insane TLD.
Not everyone can afford their own domain name. Want the web to be a space for everyone? Maybe don’t hang a sign saying “you must be this rich to enter”. Either include people in the global south, rural areas and so on, or else admit your “everyone” is in fact an exclusive club.
I can’t quite articulate a good category name for them, but I see a lot of personal sites (especially on neocities) that don’t have blogs at all. Some might have occasional articles, or they may be mainly places to show off art and fiction writing. Or someone makes a fansite, or a site dedicated to a very neiche topic that just collects and shares facts/resources on that topic.
There’s also the curious question of sites that have blogs but don’t consider themselves to be blog focused (instead putting more time into, say, an art gallery). How do you generally handle them, or plan to?
or a site dedicated to a very neiche topic that just collects and shares facts/resources on that topic.
This to me sounds like a topic blog rather than a generic personal blog which is definitely something that has a place on the blogroll. There are a bunch on the already.
I can’t quite articulate a good category name for them, but I see a lot of personal sites (especially on neocities) that don’t have blogs at all. Some might have occasional articles, or they may be mainly places to show off art and fiction writing.
This it’s a bit more complicated. Generally speaking, if I see that a site has content that is even somewhat randomly updated and it’s interesting content, I tend to include those.
There’s also the curious question of sites that have blogs but don’t consider themselves to be blog focused (instead putting more time into, say, an art gallery). How do you generally handle them, or plan to?
This depends on the site. If a site is a portfolio for example, and that’s 95% of the content of the site, if there’s a blog on the side that is updated once every 15 months, I usually don’t include it.
Especially because I already have a more anything-goes type of site in The Forest where there’s literally everything in there. So on the blogroll I try to keep things at least a bit more under control.