On Owning Your Words

In 2006, I started a blog on Blogger. In 2009 I moved to Tumblr. By 2012 everything was Twitter. Then Medium. Then Substack. Then Mastodon. Now Bluesky.

I’ve spent two decades moving my writing from one landlord to the next, each time because the previous platform got worse, or was acquired, or just stopped feeling right. Each time, I left something behind — old posts, reply threads, the context that made things make sense.

The problem with renting

When you post on a platform, you’re a tenant. The landlord sets the rules, can raise the rent at any time, can renovate the building in ways you hate, or bulldoze it entirely. You knew this when you moved in, but it always feels like a betrayal when it happens.

The IndieWeb community has been thinking about this for a long time. Their central principle is simple: publish on your own site first, then syndicate outward. Your home page is your home. Everything else is a window.

What I do now

This site is my canonical home. When I write something worth keeping, it lives here first. I might copy it to other places — and if those places disappear, the original is still here.

It’s more work. Building and maintaining a personal site takes time. Markdown files don’t have an algorithm pushing them to people who might care. The audience is smaller.

But the words are mine. I can change them, delete them, or let them sit for ten years. No platform can take them from me. That trade-off has started to feel worth it.

On permanence

I don’t think everything needs to be permanent. Some thoughts are meant to be fleeting. But when you write something you’d be proud to find in twenty years — an essay, a long-form explanation, a piece of thinking you worked hard at — that deserves a stable address.

A URL you own, on a domain you control, with files you can back up: that’s about as permanent as the web gets.

It’s not perfect. Domains expire. Hosting bills go unpaid. But it’s more permanent than any platform I’ve ever trusted.