(writer of the site here) I've never liked Twitter, or any mainstream social media for that matter. The only one that came close for me was Google+, that was brilliant, I thought.
So yeah, nothing to do with the shit show that is Elon Musk, it's just good timing. :-)
I think you misspelled “profit” there. Engagement isn't the driver for the algorithm, profit is. It’s all about showing “fresh” content on every refresh so they have your eyes longer, and therefore more ad revenue.
Masto is chronological, so there’s WAY more chance of natural discovery of content. It’s not buried by the algorithm because it doesn’t align with the hot take of the day, or isn't “trending”.
I’ve personally found Mastodon to be far more engaging than Twitter, but that’s probably not going to be the se for everyone.
Im a firm believer in links being underlined. I also wanted it to be a little opinionated, as to started life as a personal project, yet easy to customise.
Thanks for all the feedback and comments here, folks. It really is appreciated.
I’m not a professional web designer - this just started off as a personal project that I ended up publishing as people I shared it with seemed to like it.
I’m taking on board the various feedback from people much more knowledgeable than I here, again I really appreciate it.
If you do have feedback/changes I’d urge you to log an Issue or a PR on Github[1].
Also great to see so many other minimal CSS projects that I wasn't aware of. I’ll have to add an alternatives page to the site, I think.
There was SO MUCH more I wanted to mention. Cookie banners being one of them, but I figured it was long enough as it was. I will likely add more to it in the future though.
(author here) I agree - there's definitely a technical ransom to pay for hosting your own site, even with managed solutions, there's still domain names, hosting etc. to work though - it's not for everyone and I'm not claiming it is.
Maybe I wasn't clear on that point, apologies if that's the case. I spoke about POSSE and using more decentralised platforms, like Mastodon.
Again, they're not for everyone either, and I don't expect them to be. It would just be nice if we got a little more of web 1.0 back. :-)
Erm, kinda. The site does talk about POSSE (Post Once to your Site, Syndicate Everywhere), as well as using web 2.0 to your advantage. So I don't think it's hypocritical for the site to be SEO or social optimised.
Completely agree with this. I have a semi-successful blog and what I would consider to be a successful career. My blog has never helped my career, but I enjoy the process of writing and putting my thoughts/opinions/learnings out there.
Just do it for yourself. If anything else comes of it, that’s a bonus.
You get out what you put in when running a blog. You need to market your site unfortunately. That’s where SEO, social sharing, newsletters and all those other annoying things come in. Even on a platform with an existing audience, like Medium, you will still be drowned out in the noise, unless you’re *very* lucky.
Bonus to hosting your own stuff is that you own it and no one can take that from you.
I respect the privacy of my readers, so I’d never dream of using Google Analytics - it’s awful.
Both Plausible, Fathom and GoatCounter are privacy respecting alternatives to GA. However, all JavaScript based analytics are blocked by lots of people, so they’re not that accurate. They’re indicative at best.
Then there’s web log parsers, like AWStats. They catch everything, which is where another problem comes in. Crawlers. Many of these tools try to rule out web crawlers, but never catch them all, so these tools tend to over inflate your visitors numbers. Once again, they’re indicative at best.
I’m currently using Netlify Analytics on my site, which uses logs, but I’m thinking about cancelling my subscription and just being blissfully unaware of who’s visiting my site.
So yeah, nothing to do with the shit show that is Elon Musk, it's just good timing. :-)