[reitoei]

> But for the casual user, I think it's become more difficult to self publish over the years, not less.

No. The exact opposite, in fact. Micro-publishing services like Twitter & Tumbler have enabled millions of casual users to publish and distribute their own content with a few keystrokes and a couple clicks.

[blowski]

In the context of this discussion, 'self-publish' means you control your content and its distribution. In that sense, Twitter and Tumbler are not self-publishing, since they own the software and can do pretty much whatever they like with your content. Also, you can't just pick up your Tweets and move them all to Facebook while retaining the same URL, whereas you can do this moving from self-hosted WordPress to self-hosted Jekyll.

That said, I don't think it's become harder to self-publish, but it hasn't matched the progress made by services like Twitter.

[yen223]

To add to this, it wasn't too long ago that the technical and financial cost of setting up and running a server were too prohibitive for the casual user.

Nowadays, I can set up a public-facing server with a few clicks for $5 a month. We have it too easy.