[didibus]

I don't think the missing bit is the "ease" of self-hosting a blog.

The missing piece is that social networks are not about publishing your thoughts ideas or knowledge, they are about propagating your thoughts ideas and knowledge to others. The emphasis of a social network is on "propagation" aka, propaganda.

Social networks push opinions into people's face, it promotes, markets and advertises messages in ways that people can't avoid reading even if they're not looking for it.

They're not designed to make accessible information for those looking for it, but to allow you to advertise yourself and your ideas to others. And definitely not designed in any way to filter for accurate and high quality information.

What social networks do is make it really easy to voluntarily subscribe to propaganda and be subjected to it day in/day out. It's bonkers when you think about it that we all agree to participate in this.

[rohan1024]

> they are about propagating your thoughts ideas and knowledge to others. The emphasis of a social network is on "propagation" aka, propaganda.

That is the issue with centralization: you have no control over your feed, no control over your data, no control over discussion on your content.

On the other hand blogs/websites are all federated by design. You can control who views your content, shares your content. You control discussion on your website. You are also responsible for your content and moderation. You can also curate your own feed with RSS.

[didibus]

You missed my point, I'm saying that the reason for social networks being popular is because they allow various actors to submit others to their propaganda.

The reason people prefer posting to facebook or twitter (or even medium) say compared to their own blog, isn't the challenges in setting up a personal blog. It's because on facebook and twitter they can push their post to a big audience, even if no one is searching for the kind of content they're publishing.

A self hosted blog/website does not have this feature.

Just as an example, the government does have an official self-hosted blog: whitehouse.gov and the President could have simply published all their thoughts and messages there instead of Twitter. They could also easily have a personal self-hosted blog. But why didn't and don't they? Instead choosing to post to Twitter?

[schoen]

Interesting point. Could we see part of the contrast as the extremely low friction involved in the equivalent of "reblogging"?

On a blog, there is always the possibility that a post would "go viral", but the odds of that happening (and the potential reach) seem dramatically lower than for something like Twitter and Facebook. Maybe, to borrow a possible-not-quite-applicable concept we've been hearing about from epidemiology, the R₀ for popular posts on blogs is intrinsically going to be much lower than that for popular posts on these kinds of social media?

After all, Twitter and Facebook (eventually) added a standardized means for reposting something without changing it, typically with a very rapid and easy user interface flow. There's probably never been anything as quick, easy, or standardized for reblogging, including because reblogging always has potential to remove or change the format, context, and content of what gets reblogged (and in the case of reblogging as a link, to require blog readers to follow the link in order to see the content, which could also be seen as reducing the blog's R₀-equivalent, since fewer people will follow a link than would read something in a feed that gets pre-rendered for them).