On some level there’s no doubt that there is nothing better than “my own”.

… and, that is why I’m posting this on My Own daily spillage site. I can’t see any reason to move away from that model, and in fact there is room to double down on it–by for example, moving it off of the web hosting company’s server and on to one I run myself. I could do that; I might do that.

“Owning” digital real estate, though, is not any more foolproof than ‘owning’ land or a home in the real world. The tax people can still take it away, should you decide to not jump through their hoops. System tricks like eminent domain and civil asset forfeiture do exist. Glenn Greenwald is fond of reminding us about what happened to Parler, on the digital side.

In addition to “my own” not being any guarantee for reasons like that, there are two problems with the model.

One, hosting video is expensive, and self-hosting means that expense falls on the owner.

Two, the ‘owner’ still has to find a way to gather views and an audience and a subsequent revenue stream, all by his/her lonesome. This is the really hard part.

They used to say that freedom of the press was limited to those who own a press. A printing press, they meant, in those cro-magnon times, but also a means of distribution and all that goes with it. Buying ink. Hiring newsboys.

So to work around all of that overhead, the average citizen in the digital age is virtually compelled to get on board with a platform, or multiple platforms.

If you’re selling real goods, that might mean $15 a month to Shopify: https://anaprim.myshopify.com

But speaking specifically of digital content, it might mean free-as-in-beer but very definitely not free-as-in-freedom, as with those googly YouTubista fucks and their disappearing view counts and their cramming of ads down the throats of your viewers.

Mere mortals will only be heard through the munificence of their chosen platforms, and that largesse can always be withdrawn, very often without warning or recourse. (“The meaning of largesse is liberal giving to, or as if to, an inferior” … Merriam-Webster)

This is all true regardless of how Good the platform is, and even deciding what’s Good can be a very convoluted exercise:

Yes, Patreon bans people, and it does so for reasons that are sometimes quite suss. They have a specific clause, for example, that affirms their right to ban you for “medical misinformation”, and recent events have shown quite clearly that no one knows what “misinformation”, medical or otherwise, even means.

It all ends up being a matter of relative risk and reward, and choosing which platforms comport best with one’s own values.

Glenn Greenwald rolled his own (sorta) at the Intercept, and then that went to shit in a hurry over Hunter Biden’s laptop. He moved to Substack, and then (for reasons that are still opaque, at least to me), grew disenchanted there and moved to Rumble, which he praises highly for reasons that I find quite credible (although not quite definitively persuasive, for my own use case).

For the moment …

I’m staying put here, for words and images. I’m holding onto Shopify for selling real goods.

As for the videos …

I’m committed to posting some version of each episode in at least two places, and probably three.

Patreon is the go-to, at least until they decide to start charging more, and Substack is a strong contender for the alternative if they do. I can’t not post at YouTube, even though I find it galling (they just ripped my latest video down to literally Zero views), because the potential for audience is just too strong to ignore–I have exactly one video that has over 4000 views and is still getting a dozen or more every day, even by YT’s own fucked-up metrics.

Attempting to keep things at least somewhat streamlined, I’m going to mostly ignore my own presence on Rumble and Odysee and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Liberapay and Venmo and GiveSendGo and Ko-Fi, pending some kind of proof that they’re more worth it than they have been.

I still need to check out a few more possibilities before I write all that in stone and turn my platform-hunting back down to a low-maintenance simmer.

SubscribeStar
Boosty
BuyMeACoffee
Wattpad
… and any number of POD solutions, including Patreon’s own Shop

Onward, Christian Soldiers.