[Puer]

The author's thesis is fundamentally flawed. They say it isn't clear why everyone was so excited to have a Facebook, but that's exactly the answer - because everyone had a Facebook. One of the biggest appeals of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (which is arguable even more useless than FB), etc. is that every nobody has direct access to an audience of millions. They can scream their offensive, unoriginal, spontaneous, nuanced thoughts into the void and instantaneously get sympathy, disgust, praise, and simple acknowledgement with little to no effort.

Contrast this with maintaining a personal website. Even in a world where FB doesn't exist, it's still a chore to get people to memorize yet another URL and regularly visit it, especially if it isn't updated on a consistent schedule (which most personal websites aren't.) Furthermore, given that the author seems to be advocating for self-sufficiency as much as possible and avoiding centralized platforms, assuming you're hosting your own website and not using a cookie cutter template, you're now fighting Google for search engine visibility and that's a battle that is absolutely not based on merit of content.

This is not to mention the unpleasantness of using most personal websites because they're poorly designed (light text on a white background), or they try and guilt-trip me into supporting them with Patreon/Paypal popups, or the only consistent content produced is content promising to produce more content in the future, etc.

I'm probably reading too much into the author's article, to be honest. It's a nice sentiment and I agree, but at the same time the thing I don't understand about the recent trend of publishing articles on mainstream news sites preaching the life benefits of going cold turkey on social media is that it isn't a binary choice. I know it's a novel idea, but you don't have to quit FB to pick up that hobby you once loved again! You don't have to quit FB to maintain your personal website! In fact, you can probably use FB and your audience on it to grow your readership on your personal website! Even if you accept the author's argument that personal websites fulfill the purpose that FB does (strongly disagree), they give no reason why you have to pick one over the other.

¿Porque no los dos

[IshKebab]

Yeah the idea of everyone setting up a personal website with their real name and a recognisable photo of themselves is pretty laughable. Are people going to upload photos and implement an account system to restrict access too?

That was Facebook's original raison d'etre (and the source of its name).

[klez]

You don't need to implement anything. There are self-hosted CMSs and blog platforms that have been doing this for a long time.

I'm not saying it's as easy as Facebook, but it's not "you need to be a developer"-hard either.

[dvtrn]

I'm not saying it's as easy as Facebook, but it's not "you need to be a developer"-hard either.

Tangent:

I've now talked four friends who wanted to start blogging out of spending money on AWS instances and VPS providers because they were convinced this was the path they absolutely had to take just to start writing things using WordPress. These are not technical people.

Which makes me wonder where that impression is coming from. Surely it couldn't have been Wordpress.com because the site goes out of their way to show how easy it is to sign up and start blogging on their platform, but I've long wondered why they were all so eager to avoid taking the simplest path to their goals since none of them were above spending money to realize their goals of having a blog.

[androidgirl]

Hey, I know where that's coming from!

Awhile ago I was digging through Pinterest on topics related to blogging, finance, online business, etc.

A lot of these pins target millennials and moms (wow, especially moms).

The point of most of these sites is affiliate marketing; they've got deals with hostgator, bluehost, godaddy, whatever, and get kickbacks when users sign up.

So all these pinboardss about blogs about blogging advocate for the VPS route because it's how they make cash.

[BeetleB]

While you don't need to implement things, as a developer, I gave up on self hosting. Having N self-hosted services, and having to keep them up to date for security purposes (and worry about updates breaking things) was really not worth the effort.

Self hosting is a pain. Let's not kid ourselves. It seems easy initially, but over the years, you really feel like it's better just to pay someone to manage it all for you.