Posthaven and its tradeoffs; blogging humility

Posthaven is a "post with email, minimal blog" option. I found it while I was sitting around this morning wondering about whatever happened to Posterous all those years ago. 

Well, it got sold off to Twitter and its founders made something a lot like it with a simple but probably difficult mission:

Posthaven is a long-term project that aims to create the world's simplest, most usable, most long-lasting blogging platform. We don’t have investors, show ads, or even take salaries. Posthaven is designed to outlive us, and that’s the goal behind everything we do.

It has been "planning" Markdown support for a while, and I don't mention that to throw shade. The more I think about my own line of reasoning and assumptions, the more I understand that no, Markdown is not a "no-brainer." But it's also common as dirt, understandably something people are interested in, and curious to omit in 2024.

The cross-posting options are Facebook, "Twitter," and LinkedIn. There are a few themes that aren't aging well. The UI is from the "3d buttons" era of Web design.

Maybe that's all fine. You could do plenty if what you wanted was to fork one of their themes, figure things out for yourself, and just enjoy the luxury of a mail-to-post interface.

I think of all the things in my tech life that were "just fine" for a very long time, then tipped over into mediocrity. Like Dropbox, which was a big, dumb box in the sky and then suddenly started clamoring for attention and wanted to take over everything. So you find yourself thinking "what if they'd just decided that whatever money they were already making spent just fine and had quit screwing around with it?"

Well, it seldom works that way.

So if you want to build something that can soldier on forever on starvation rations, you have to make your tradeoffs.

As I sit here playing around with Scribbles, my hope is that it won't evolve much further, because we already have WordPress dominating one web publishing paradigm, and a collection of SSGs all occupying their particular niches, and we have Tumblr, Ghost, Medium, etc. etc. They're all busy piling on features and doing what they need to do to get money from people. 

Scribbles, meanwhile, suggests a point of view about putting words on the web that is reflective of a kind of humility about what it means to have a blog for everyday people: 

You've got a few things to say now and then, you may occasionally call back to yourself but also may not, you are under no illusions that posterity will mourn if your taxonomies are not well organized, and the point of entry to your blog is probably social media of some kind, because you toot/tweet/post about what you write on Mastodon/X/LinkedIn/Facebook,  or maybe because  someone subscribed to your feed, or maybe because  someone of algorithmic note at some point linked to you and vaulted you to the third page of results for some narrow combination of keywords. 

It's like that CJ Chilvers quote: 

Few people are really “following” your work. Even fewer care. What are you doing with that freedom?

If readership matters much to you, and you're just a person with a day job, I think it is probably more fruitful to think of yourself as a human presence with an ever-fluctuating list of followers, and not as a publishing impresario. The front page of your "property" consequently means much less than all those relationships. 

But that's just me. I spent 13 years in online content and performance marketing, played the game as best I could during the nascent social web and social media eras, and was better than average at SEO for a period (I willed a shitty, third-tier site with a $1200/month editorial budget to the top results in Google for a few meaningful keywords), and recovered a network of over 40 sites from the ravages of Panda with analytics tooling I taught myself how to program Rails to make. I was brought up with a very "the front page matters and your nav needs to be correct" view of the world. 

So I'm still in the process of deprogramming myself from assumptions I carry around from all that. I am happily on the way to a sort of pastoral web presence primitivism. It suits me to have a site that looks sort of clean and can hold a few things it is useful to link to from LinkedIn when I'm trying to get attention there or whatever, but otherwise doesn't require a lot of thinking.