With this post I like to reboot my personal blog. In the past I have used for a long time medium.com as blogging platform but there are several reasons why I am no longer happy with the platform. I have thought about choosing one of the thousand alternative platforms for blogging but in the end they all have downsides. Instead of going through all downsides I like to share my thoughts about the advantages of a self-hosted blog, maybe I can convince also some readers to start again with a self-hosted blog.
Data sovereignty
If you host your own blog the content of your blog is under your control. An external blogging platform is a company which needs to make money, they need to somehow use your blogging content to create revenue since they offer the platform mostly for free. This is done by adding some kind of partner program or paywalls. On your own blog you are complete free from those topics and you can get sure that your content is not misused.
Data durability
Your thoughts and ideas which you write are an important part of your legacy. You probably want that this content is also available after your lifetime. Blogging platforms are limited to the lifetime of the company behind the platform which is often not too long, if the company closes your content will also disappear. If you host your own blog you have automatically multiple mechanisms to archive your content. In my case I use a public GitHub repository where all posts are stored. Then your blog is probably also covered by archive.org which creates over time a complete backup of your blog. Through your own domain and content you basically participate in the history of the internet.
Data quality
Most blogging platforms provide some kind of WYSIWYG editor to write your content. Such editors often produce ugly HTML and they are also limited. Especially for development content I find often examples where code examples or code-highlighting are broken. If you want to preserve your content for the long term it is probably better to write the HTML content by your self, this ensures better data quality and makes it better readable.
Decentralization
This is an idealistic point but if you host your own blog you help to decentralize the web. You may know the largest problem of the current web is centralization, this means that there are only some centralized platforms or so called data silos like Twitter, Facebook etc. where all content gets created. In the end those platforms are dependent on your content, if you decide to move this content to your own blog you remove some power from those platforms.
Conclusion
These points have convinced me to start again with my own self-hosted blog. But there are of course also some disadvantages. The largest disadvantage is probably discoverability, on a central platform you get automatically readers from the users on the platform, on your own blog you depend on a search engine to find new readers. In the future it would be cool to have some kind of aggregation service where self-hosted blogs could register to reach a wider audience, to support those self-hosted blogs.
Future
Regarding this blog, in the future I will write content around my open source projects and in general development topics like API management, REST, code generation, specifications and decentralization. I will also go through my old medium.com posts and transfer them to this blog. If you are interested feel free to subscribe to the feed.