If you’ve ever read this blog, you know I work in analytics and data collection in MarTech. And if you’ve ever read this blog, I will never know it. Despite what I do for a living, this site has no way of tracking you. I even installed the Google Fonts on my own server so your IP address never reaches Google, and I keep no logs of who visits which page.
I’m a millennial, and like most people my age I’ve started feeling nostalgic. Not the “things were better in my day” kind of nostalgia. What I miss is the cultural context we were swimming in. Back then, helped along by being young, it felt like you could say and do whatever you wanted. Malcolm in the Middle was genuinely unhinged by today’s standards. Daria, Beavis and Butt-Head, System of a Down wrecked on stage. We hadn’t yet become the ghost of ourselves: first as SJWs a decade later, then again as shadows who communicate in leet speak to dodge the filter. Writing unaliv3d instead of dead is moronic. Or rather, m0r0n1c.
The whole point of self-censorship is that you avoid certain words because otherwise the landlord won’t show your message to your own followers. We swapped free spaces that we held for someone else’s spaces, rented, where we obey an algorithm whose policies we have never even read.
This is centralization. The same thing already happened with search. Everything converged on Google, and every site slowly became a copy of a copy of a copy, shaped by SEO. It’s happening again with GEO, or with AI in general: now we write so that ChatGPT will cite us as a source.
I want to be clear that I’m not the conspiracy theorist accusing power of taking something from me. Nobody stole this freedom. We traded it. Zero friction, free distribution, an instant audience. Going back costs effort, and that effort is exactly why almost nobody goes back.
I don’t know whether my post on remigration would have been shadowbanned on Reddit or Facebook, and I have no interest in finding out. Holding a space of my own is precisely so I can say what I want without running it through a filter first. I can say that Putin and Netanyahu are war criminals for slaughtering children and innocent civilians, and I don’t have to check that against anyone’s list of banned words. (This one from LSSU, on the other hand, is just funny.)
What I find strange is watching people rail against governments in the name of free expression and then quietly censor themselves anyway. For most of the last decade, the thing actually shaping what you say online hasn’t been a statute. Nobody is prosecuted for writing the word dead. We simply moved the power from a state’s executive branch to a private company’s terms of service, and then we internalized it.
There’s a second layer to the centralization problem, which is that we handed our personal archive to the same party that writes the rules. Every so often you read about someone whose business or personal account was deleted overnight with no acceptable explanation, left with nothing and no way to recover any of it.
This blog runs on a machine I manage, rented from Infomaniak. If they decided to ban me from their service tomorrow, I’d go elsewhere. That’s the actual objective: resilient, not untouchable. Being completely independent is impossible. Having replaceable suppliers is not. If Instagram closes my profile tomorrow, I still have a site to send clients to. If the site goes down, I move it.
Ed Zitron is the clearest example of this I know. He gives away posts that run well past ten thousand words on his own site and sells a newsletter on top of them, and he self-hosts none of it. The site runs on Ghost, a platform somebody else operates and he pays for. What he owns is the domain name and the email list, and that’s enough to swap out every other piece of the stack without losing a single reader. That part is worth copying and it doesn’t require you to know what nginx is. The part you can’t copy is the audience: he arrived with a network already built from a career in tech PR. The infrastructure is the easy half. The reason anyone reads you is not.
Because I don’t much care about the numbers, and hence the intro about analytics, POSSE works fine for me: publish on my own site, syndicate elsewhere, point people back home. For anyone who actually works with social media it works badly, because platforms deliberately penalize outbound links. Holding your attention is the business model. AI generated answers in search results make it worse still: they answer the question without sending traffic to anyone.
Back to that intro. Not having analytics isn’t only a choice I made for visitor privacy. It’s also that I don’t want to write the way social media teaches you to write, where a piece performs well and you milk that cow until it collapses. I write to write.
I’ll admit the limit of that, though. I’m free of the metric because I don’t have it, not because I’m virtuous. The day I actually wanted an audience, I’d want the data back. It’s the same mechanism as unaliv3d, only politer. You don’t need a landlord to censor you. A dashboard will do the job, and you’ll think it was your own idea.
So, to close this short piece: I’m not telling you to self-host everything and become a sysadmin. I’m telling you to own the archive of your own work. Google Takeout or the Instagram export are a good first step toward safety. A small site holding your own content means that if the platforms go down the message survives, and you stop living with the low grade worry that you’ve fallen foul of one of those absurd, shareholder-serving policies you never agreed to read.
This post has no tracking tag on it. I’ll never know whether you made it this far.