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Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

The year is 2025. The internet in the shape that we've known it in the early 2000s is no longer there. Or, not quite in the shape that we've seen it before. This is not just plain nostalgia talking - the vibrant ecosystem of blogs, feeds, personal sites, and forums has been usurped by a few mega-concentrated players.

You also want to ensure that your site can contribute to audience growth on channels where folks are concentrated - if someone stumbles across your blog post on Hacker News, make it easy for them to find out that you are also on Mastodon or other networks where that visitor might already hang out. Thankfully, despite the centralization, we also have a huge diversity of tools that enable you to do all sorts of nice things around your property, like mailing lists ( Buttondown, Mailchimp, and Kit come to mind) and monetization systems (such as Stripe, Patreon, or Gumroad). Funnily enough, this kind of behavior has been the downfall of a lot of “walled-off” communities that I’ve been a part of on Slack and Discord - people would use them to self-promote their blogs and other content, and it all became useless because on every visit, I’d see one hundred links with exactly zero conversation around it.

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