I read a couple of blog posts today that contribute to a theme that has been present in my own writing and relationship to the web albeit from different perspectives. Namely, the idea that for the web to be more democratic, we need to make it more accessible. Nothing revolutionary about the idea itself, but surprisingly complex when we think about how most people use the web (and computing devices in general).

Substack and the blogosphere

In an article titled Can Substack Recover the Blogosphere We Lost?, Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of The Jacobin, writes about the early blogosphere and how conversations developed within it, contrasting it with modern publishing tools like Substack. The difference comes down to this: while blogs expand conversations (both in topics and in reach), Substack constrains them to a distinct format that alienates non members.

That was the secret sauce of the political blogosphere at its peak: it felt simultaneously democratic and curated. You read people who took time to understand a subject, and then, in their comment sections or on your own blog, you argued back. “Trackback pings” stitched these conversations together. RSS readers made sure you didn’t miss the next round. The result wasn’t a canon, but a shared public square with porous borders.

The older blog world was fundamentally interdependent. Its culture was outward-facing: link to argue, link to endorse, link to say, “if you’re reading me, you should read them.” Newsletters are, by default, inward-facing. Their unit of distribution is the inbox, not the open web.

Substack works against accessibility by establishing a hierarchy of readers: those who have an account and those who don’t. Substack is yet another attempt at a social media platform, and its most egregious issues are best summarized in one of my favorite blog posts from last year by Anil Dash.

Anil Dash, Don’t Call It a Substack (2024):

We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.

Dash says “there is only your writing”, but if I am a writer with little to no experience with technology, what are my options? Do I sign up for Medium, Substack, or whatever platform du jour we’ll have a few months from now?

It’s difficult to maintain a website, that’s why most people simply don’t have one.

Click the link in my bio is a common phrase used by content creators. In their bio we find a link to a collection of links (usually a Linktree or similar), which in turn sends people to more platforms.

My name is Blah Blah, click the link in the bio to see my:

• Substack
• Spotify
• Letterboxd
• Goodreads

That’s crazy, right?! My developer mind immediately thinks all of that could be under Blah Blah’s website. Why is a seperate account needed on distinct platforms simply to share your opinion about something? Can’t all of it be on a blog?

Well, it can’t. At least not for the average person. It turns out making a website is hard, making a blog is hard, and large platforms like Squarespace / Wix / etc have done everything in their power to make it easier on their terms, which of course means that you end up locked into their system to the tune of a monthly subscription fee.

Tumblr succeeded in its time because they realized that most people do want to share what they stumble upon in their own space, but they also want their discoveries to be seen by others.

In 2025, how do you really get your blog seen by others without spamming a link on closed discussion platforms like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Hacker News, etc.? Do you link to them on your social media profile? That’s just more of the same!

If we want to see more personal blogs from people beyond the tech world, we have to acknowledge that it’s not only that platforms make it difficult to engage with the wider open web, it is also simply difficult to create your own space on the web. And we haven’t done enough to address that.

Beginners don’t know as much as you do

A couple of weeks ago I went to a wedding and my sister and I were talking with some family members about reviewing music and books and we got to talking about blogging.

You have a blog?! was the first question. What website do you use to blog? was the second one. Ah, there’s what those commercial platforms have accustomed us to! You need a website to blog, you need one of their products to have a presence online. And you know what? They’re right!

My sister talked about using Wordpress and I talked about this site and how I write all of it in a thing called Markdown, build it with a thing called Jekyll, and then publish it on my own server.

Annie Mueller wrote a blog post about something like this in her post How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner.

“Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!) and I like working with Shoobababoo and occasionally kleptomitrons. I’ve gotten to work for Company1 doing Shoobaboo-ing code things and that’s what led me to the Snarfus. So, let’s dive in!

Painfully accurate.

I’d love it if everyone had their own website, but I’m a hypocrite, talking about how easy it is to blog while I write these words inside a text editor because plaintext files are just so simple to use. The reality, however, is that most people never leave their web browser!

Google Docs and Canva are perfect examples of this modern approach which refutes the UNIX philosophy in the name of convenience.

Unix philosophy as documented by Doug McIlroy in the Bell System Technical Journal (1978):

1. Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.

2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.

What’s that nonsense? If it’s not one tab away it’s too much work, I don’t want it, I don’t care. At least that’s how I imagine most people would react to that.

And I get it, you know? I love computers and I love software so spending time learning about them is fun for me. But let’s apply that level of expectations to any other discipline, any other interest, and it becomes obvious how ridiculous it all is.

If I wanted to learn guitar, for example, my goal would be to make music, not to become a luthier. Talk to me about chords, not about types of wood and their acoustic resonance!

Taylor Swift’s new album just came out and you want to talk about it. Tell me, developer friends, what’s easier: to learn HTML, CSS, learn about the terminal, learn about web hosting, learn about domains, pull out my credit card, register and pay a monthly hosting fee, then learn about RSS, learn about markup languages, write out my review of The Life of a Showgirl, or… do I just tweet or hit “publish” on Medium / Substack / etc? Come on.

Make the indie web easier

Last year Giles Turnbull wrote a post titled Let’s make the indie web easier which echoes some of Annie’s comments about ease of use when it comes to tools for self-hosting:

If we want the future web we’re all clamouring for, we need to give people more options for self-hosted independence. If we seriously, truly want the independent, non-enshittified personal web to flourish, we need to make it easier for people to join in.

Why not build static website generators that people can just unzip, upload to the shared hosting they’ve just paid for, and start using via a browser?

Why not make backups automatic, and make upgrades simple? Why not make the tricky technical stuff go away?

Wordpress is still the best option for most people, it’s beginner friendly and it has a small learning curve and I feel confident recommending it to friends and family if they want to start their own blog.

That is not an endorsement. It’s a challenge to my developer friends and myself: we must make software tools that make self-hosting and website ownership easy and beginner friendly.

No platforms. Software that lives on a server but has a welcoming interface and piques people’s curiosity, respects privacy and dignity, and connects us to the World Wide Web.

Tall order!