The first and last bastion of content creation

This week my friend Javilop published something interesting. He'd dug into the parts of the Twitter algorithm that became public a couple of years ago, distilled what he learned, and built a Claude skill out of it. The pitch is basically: feed your draft in, get back a version optimized for maximum impact on the platform.

I love that he did this, and I'm probably going to try it. But it also pulled at a question that anyone who publishes online has had to wrestle with at some point.

Where do I actually create my content?

Back in the day, the answer was easy. You had a personal blog or a homepage on a domain you owned, and you pushed your stuff out from there into the world. About twenty years ago that started to change. Third-party platforms (Medium, Tumblr, LinkedIn, X, whatever) took over distribution, and with them came the visibility algorithms that decide whether your post reaches three people or three hundred thousand.

Now it's getting even stranger with AI assistants in the mix. Your content gets indexed straight into chat conversations, and the people reading it don't necessarily know where it came from. (And I'm pretty sure that, depending on the assistant, nobody is checking whether it's true either.)

That's exactly why the third-party platforms are getting more and more protective of what you publish on them, and where else you publish it. They want the gravity to stay on their side.

So here are my two cents. We sell our content for impact. That's the deal we've all signed into. When I started this blog years ago, it was actually a reaction to that. I'd burned out from Medium, Tumblr, and a few others that all worked the same way, and I realized something obvious in hindsight: my content is mine, and I want it to live at my house.

But the fight with impact is real. Who hears a tree falling if nobody is in the forest? You need a megaphone, especially because the best part of writing publicly is forming a community, talking with people, learning from them.

Here's where I land. I'm going to keep creating on my own site, and not because of copyright (honestly, I don't value my own content that highly). I'm staying for selfish reasons.

I use my articles to think. To land ideas I've been turning over in my head. To learn things I'm actually curious about. Writing is my hobby, not my living. So this bastion was the first one I built, and I intend it to be the last. (I don't move by certainties, so I might absolutely change my mind if I see something convincing in the future. Side note.)

That doesn't mean ignoring the algorithms. (I wrote about the technical side of this — moving from Webflow to owning your own stack — if you're curious about the how.) I still play with them. I post on the platforms, and I use comments, threads and replies to point people back to the canonical link whenever I can. The home is here. The megaphones are out there.

Curious to hear how you're navigating this. Drop me a line on LinkedIn or X if you've figured out a smarter setup.