Domains and owning your content
This page is currently hosted on micro.blog under a custom domain. Hosting things on your own domain is the absolutely most important part of owning and controlling your content and web presence.
If you have one thing you take away from this post, that is it. (Assuming you want your content to stay around). You need a domain.
Luckily there is a wide range of top domains available nowadays, for a wide range of prices, so you should be able to find something you like. A little tip though when picking a top-level (the .com/.re part), be wary of promotions. It is often possible to get a domain on a sale for as little as $1, but that price usually applies only to the first year. So when picking a domain, even if you don’t pay upfront for ten years, at least check the price for ten years, so you have an idea of the recurring cost will be in the future.
There is a multitude of domain providers; the one I use is Gandi.net, while not the cheapest they have served me well. They are EU (France) based and seem to make an effort to be nice. If you decide to go with them, you can use this referral to get 20% off and give me a small kickback.
Hosted vs. self-hosting
Now back to the topic, micro.blog. While I am perfectly capable of hosting my blog on my own server, I don’t think I want to. And I believe paid-hosted services is the best option for most.
Self-hosting, anything, always has its pros and cons. On the pro side, you learn a lot, and you maintain full control over it. On the downside, it takes time and effort to learn it, and you need to continuously spend time maintaining and watching it to make sure it stays up. Spending time on keeping it up to date is especially important; otherwise, things can quickly end up like the security-hellscape that is self-hosted WordPress blogs and sites.
So I decided that for now, I will try to use the micro.blog hosting until I run into some roadblock. An additional reason is that I like what @manton and his crew are doing, and I want to support them. So my life becomes easier, and I support a good cause, win-win.
Federation
One of the reasons I picked Micro.blog, was for the built-in Twitter and Linked-in federation. But after posting a few things, I am not sure I want to use it. It’s one of these features, which sounds nice until you use it. It made me realise that maybe I don’t want to post the same thing on every platform.
I am going to think about this and maybe ping @manton to see if there are any plans to make it possible to configure federation for each individual post.
I’ll write more thoughts after I’ve used it for some time.