I’m delighted to hear that my daughter and her best friend will be collaborating on a blog. And of course I’m tickled that she asked my advice on where to run it. I noted that Ghost is the new kid on the block, and is much simpler than what WordPress has become. But they want to do it for free, so WordPress it is.
Then she surprised me with this narrative:
I heard it’s better if you self-host, so that’s what we’ll want to do, right? I think self-hosting is good because you don’t have the website name in your blog URL. Also, more importantly, I think it’s how you ensure that it’s actually yours.
It turns out that she’d conflated self-hosting, i.e. running your own instance of the WordPress software and database, with the simpler method my own blog exemplifies. I use WordPress.com precisely because, although I do run my own servers, the fewer the better. I’m happy to rely on WordPress to host my blog for me. I’m also happy to pay them $13/year to connect jonudell.wordpress.com to blog.jonudell.net.
So that’ll be the solution for my daughter. But I’m left wondering how many others conflate self-hosting with domain redirection, and how that affects their thinking about control of their own digital identities and data. I suspect it’s often unclear that, whether you run a blog on WordPress.com or on another provider’s server, your data is equally under your control. Likewise, use of a personal domain name is equally possible in both cases. What is the difference? With self-hosting, you can use arbitrary WordPress plugins and themes, and/or modify the software. Sometimes, for some people, that matters. Often, for many, it doesn’t.
That said, I agree with Mike Caulfield’s plea to make servers dumb again. In my ideal world, I’d not only outsource the management of the blog software to WordPress, but would also connect the software to my personal cloud, which would be implemented by my chosen storage provider.
I got this idea from Gorden Bell’s MyLifeBits, and riffed on it to imagine cloud-hosted lifebits. Jim Groom ably summed up the argument here:
Will we ever get there? It has to happen sooner or later. Maybe, as Doug Levin suggests today, it’ll be sooner.
Its great that they aren’t just using Facebook, like so many people and businesses. I have no problem with people using Facebook, I don’t, but it’s a bad idea to force readers, customers, users, family etc. to use Facebook or not see your content.