Obviously, I’m a big proponent of a platform-light social internet, which I’ll admit is largely nostalgia for a simpler time when we all had blogs and then could read each other’s blogs using RSS. Of course this was also better when Google Reader (RIP) added a little layer of sorta semi-private social sharing on the top, but that dream is well and truly dead.
In any case, as much as I want everyone just to jump off twitter and spin up a personal website, I know it’s probably not happening. One element here is cost. That other website is, famously, free. Running your own microplatform, not so much. Here’s what I pay in USD:
- domain name: $14/year
- hosting: $48/year (though, granted, I run three or four sites off the one plan)
- RSS reader (feedbin): $50/year
And of course there was a little time overhead in getting everything up and running. Can it be done cheaper? Definitely — it’s easy enough to get most of the feature set by cobbling together free offerings. But when competing against effortlessly easy, zero-cost platforms . . . I’m not actually as sanguine about the rebloggening as I like to pretend.