Blue skies and open roads
I don't have anything profound to say at the moment about TikTok, which came back online while I was writing this. But as social media companies continue to fail us in so many ways – becoming AI-generated cesspools and forcing the opinions of their thin-skinned billionaire owners on us – there's never been a better opportunity for you to try owning your own presence online.
The easiest way to do that? Buy a domain name! And use it!
Good ol' schwanksta.com has been my slice of the internet for over a decade, and it lets me:
- Host my main website
- Run my blog (which can send you emails!)
- Use @schwanksta.com as my Bluesky handle
- Set up my Mastodon account as [email protected]
- Own my own email (say [email protected])
It's easy and cheap to get a domain, and it's the first step to getting yourself a place that is more durable than your social media account, which can be turned off a whim.
There are some barriers to this, however – cost, technical knowledge and discoverability – but I think it's worth it.
Cost
Just registering a domain is pretty cheap, usually between $10-$20 per year, though some are more expensive than others. I use Cloudflare as my registrar, but I also hear good things about porkbun.
By itself, this just means you now own what happens when someone types that domain into a browser. The next step is to have it actually go somewhere.
For example, if you want to host a blog or other website, you have two main options. If you know you want a specific platform, like Wordpress or Ghost, those companies will host a site for you for as little as $5-$10 per month or so. This is the easiest route, but there are going to be pricing tiers for what you can do.
You can also sign up for a generic hosting service like Dreamhost or Bluehost, which have one-click installs for common software like Wordpress. A benefit here is that you can run whatever platform you want, and there's no tiered limitations.
Both this route and the official hosts will usually come with free or cheap domain registration as well, which is a nice perk.
For all this, figure $50-120 per year or so. I also go one step further and use Fastmail to host my email @schwanksta.com as well, which costs about $60 per year.
That may seem like a lot, especially because right now you get much of the same functionality for free: You don't pay Google to host your email, or Instagram to post photos. But Google scans your emails to sell you stuff, and Meta is monetizing every post and piece of information you give it.
They're free because they're making money off of you and whatever you publish in their ecosystems. And they don't owe you much; they can kick you off or restrict your accounts at will.
Technical knowledge
To bypass lots of the technical bits, go with a hosted option (eg, Dreamhost, Bluehost, Wordpress.com, Ghost.org, Squarespace).
At that point, you basically just pick a domain, pick your software, choose some templates for your site, and you're good to go. Then you just need to actually use it. You can publish whatever you want – photos, newsletters, short stories, puzzles, art, whatever. Experiment, have fun.
You can always change things up later – you can migrate to another blog or newsletter platform, to another host, to another domain registrar. Most internet services are quite portable, in pretty stark comparison to social media sites.
Discoverability
A key benefit of social media is discoverability – the ability for you to find people and content you're interested in, and for people to find you. TikTok's algorithm is much-vaunted because it does a very good job of surfacing stuff and people you want to see.
If you're publishing things, it stands to reason you want people to see them. This means you're probably going to still use social media, because you want to drive people from those sites to yours. One reason newsletters have gained so much popularity is because, if you can get a person to sign up from Instagram or Twitter, then you don't need them to do it again later. They'll just get the next post in their inbox.
You'll also want to make sure you're indexed in Google and other platforms. Lots of one-click hosts will do this part for you.
But the format of social media can be nice, so enter distributed social media platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon. With these, you can either host a server or otherwise attach your domain to your accounts there. In that way, your account and your domain are linked together – and these platforms are based on open protocols, meaning that no single company wholly owns access to them.
It's a promising form of social media that works with domains and the open web, and that's exciting.
The best part of the internet, to me, has always been the ease of which you can publish your own stuff. If we know each other and you want help getting a domain set up, drop me a line. I'm happy to help.
Cheers,
Ken