Buzzing Towards Babylon
Blogging platforms are changing, many for the worse, but there are plenty of good options out there.
With no formal announcement (whoops), Wordpress.com changed their pricing significantly, removing the paid tiers for personal blogging and leaving nothing in between the free plan and the $180 Business plan. I've often thought that Wordpress doesn't want to be in the business of personal blogging. Before they recently made the switch to block-based themes, most of their newer themes on Wordpress.com were geared towards businesses. It was clear from the descriptions of the themes and the static homepages advertising businesses that they weren't built with blogging in mind.
As Manton Reece points out, this move makes Micro.blog an even better value proposition at $5 a month or $50 a year.
As Micro.blog hosting has improved, I’ve thought our $5/month plan compares favorably with WordPress.com’s similarly-priced plans. Surprised that WordPress.com has now gutted their pricing lineup, with nothing in between $0 and $180/year. $5 to me is still simple and obvious.
Another reason you may want to think about blogging on Micro.blog is the fact that Elon Musk is now the largest shareholder of Twitter.
Given that he has criticized the platform for free speech and is a heavy and popular user, it is unlikely that Musk is buying Twitter stock as a passive investment.
"We would expect this passive stake as just the start of broader conversations with the Twitter board/management that could ultimately lead to an active stake and a potential more aggressive ownership role of Twitter," Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said in a client note early Monday.
As a soon-to-be-former Twitter shareholder, I can state that this news is not comforting.
Last week, Twitter banned the conservative satirical site The Babylon Bee for what it termed “hate speech.” Specifically, the “satire” involved misgendering U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine as a man. I’m not sure what’s satirical about that, but it seems cruel and certainly not at all funny. As a sign of the coming apocalypse, Elon Musk was interviewed by the Babylon Bee in December 2021. Is it possible that this ban was the act which spurred Musk into thinking of buying into Twitter to change its direction?
These changes to the biggest blogging and microblogging platforms, respectively, should give people pause. Now might be the right time to switch platforms to one like Micro.blog, where you can create long and short-form content. M.b. has a reasonable pricing structure, and you own your blog and possibly domain, with plenty of export options if you decide to move it elsewhere.
