And then you die, and you stop paying for your own web host, and it all goes away anyway, more easily than if you had posted on Medium or whatever (because if you're still alive you could keep migrating/syndicating your data to other services if they go under).
That basically happened with James Mathe. He was the owner of Minion Games, and he had an incredible tome of board game publishing on Kickstarter advice on his blog.
He died suddenly one day in 2019, and his self-hosted site went under. You can still read it to a certain extent thanks to archive.org[1], but as thankful as I am for archive.org, they don't have the best user experience.
Meanwhile if he had posted it on blogspot or on BoardGameGeek (which supports user blogs), it'd still be fully available today.
I think it's important to have a self-hosting solution, but I think you also need an alternative. The POSSE solution mentioned above would be better than only self-hosting.
Ideally these websites would have better data preservation and archiving processes, though, and too many just don't have anything in place. Because you're just not going to be able to convince everyone to host their own.
I'd settle for automatic conversion to text-only archives, that could be good enough while making the required space much more miniscule.
That basically happened with James Mathe. He was the owner of Minion Games, and he had an incredible tome of board game publishing on Kickstarter advice on his blog.
He died suddenly one day in 2019, and his self-hosted site went under. You can still read it to a certain extent thanks to archive.org[1], but as thankful as I am for archive.org, they don't have the best user experience.
Meanwhile if he had posted it on blogspot or on BoardGameGeek (which supports user blogs), it'd still be fully available today.
I think it's important to have a self-hosting solution, but I think you also need an alternative. The POSSE solution mentioned above would be better than only self-hosting.
Ideally these websites would have better data preservation and archiving processes, though, and too many just don't have anything in place. Because you're just not going to be able to convince everyone to host their own.
I'd settle for automatic conversion to text-only archives, that could be good enough while making the required space much more miniscule.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190617212658/http://www.jamesm...