build/self-hosted-blogs/index.html


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<h1 id="what-happened-to-self-hosted-blogs">What Happened to Self-Hosted Blogs?</h1>

<p>2018-10-18</p>

<p>I remember a time on the internet1 when everyone and their grandmother was running a personal blog. And I mean <em>personal</em> - not hosted on some side platform or a tacked-on addition to the rest of their website.</p>

<p>Nowadays companies and individuals alike use platforms like Medium to host and promote all of their articles, essays and case studies. I understand the draw, and can even list out the positives:</p>

<ol>
<li>A large community already exists under the Medium brand</li>
<li>It&#8217;s easy to promote your own work and follow others</li>
<li>The platform is fairly easy to setup and implement</li>
</ol>

<p>Unfortunately this has had a pretty severe impact on the blogging community as a whole - no one controls their own blogs anymore. I remember when finding a new blog was an interesting and fun experience:</p>

<ul>
<li>how did they decide to layout the page design?</li>
<li>what typefaces have they decided to use?</li>
<li>what back-end are they using?</li>
<li>how does it look and feel on mobile?</li>
</ul>

<p>These custom self-hosted blogs inspired other developers and designers to create their own blogs or tweak current ones. In a way it was a small factor in pushing what we could do on the web further and further, as designers engaged in friendly competition trying to one-up each others&#8217; creations.</p>

<p>I also believe this inspired people to write better content instead of opting for clickbait garbage in order to get &#8220;featured&#8221; or boosted promotion on the main blogging platform. But I don&#8217;t even think that&#8217;s the worst to come of this mass-migration to a singular blogging platform.</p>

<p><strong>All2 blogs look identical now.</strong> I&#8217;m not sure if that was Medium&#8217;s intention, but either way I personally think it&#8217;s horrible. The individual personality of most design and development blogs has been completely stripped away.</p>

<p>Maybe I&#8217;m just a salty designer with a narrow-minded, pessimistic view on where our blogging communities seem to be heading - or maybe I just have higher standards.</p>

<h2 id="refs">Refs</h2>

<p>1 the design world of the internet
2 by &#8220;All&#8221; I mean the majority</p>
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