[mistercow]

It’s incredibly easy now to have a “website” for a vast number of different purposes, via Facebook, Twitter, Etsy, Patreon, etc., all of which come with the added value of discoverability. And as always, the cost of ease is control. There’s value in control, but it will always be a trade off.

So arguing for making independent websites easier is really arguing for another level of granularity in the tradeoffs between “social media presence” and “Wordpress”. And I guess I’m not really sold that that’s all that helpful. The loss of discoverability is a step function you hit the moment you go independent, which means that for the vast majority of cases, there’s going to be a “dead zone” of value where having slightly more control just isn’t worth it. I’m just not sure that that dead zone doesn’t end pretty close to where the current tools are.

[BobaFloutist]

Facebook, Twitter, and Patreon are, however, walled gardens.

It's actually intensely frustrating how many small businesses (restaurants, bars, etc) have a website that's abandoned at best, and post all their updates on Instagram, almost as frustrating as when public agencies update on Twitter but not on their website. This is a clear downgrade for the public.

[mistercow]

Yeah, I think that the motivation behind the article is “it would be a social good for there to be more independent websites”, and that’s probably true, but it’s academic.

If you tell someone they should run their own website, their response is generally not going to be, as the post suggests, “how?” It’s going to be “why?”, and if your best answer is “because it’s better for society”, good luck convincing them.