migrating from Medium (and Blogger) to better options<\/p>\n
I am shifting my article posting and blogging to a new place: https:\/\/stuff.davidaugust.com\/<\/a> (I signed up for the 14 day trial\u2026 not sure yet if investing in paying monthly or annually is a good idea).<\/p>\n My reasons are various, including:<\/p>\n If you just wanna join me in where I plan to post going forward, and don\u2019t want the almost stream-of-consciousness-of how I got here, you can just go there<\/a>, hopefully subscribe, follow, sign-up, and you can not read the rest of this.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not yet a big enough \u201ccontent creator\u201d to likely be targeted by various authorities for hurting their feelings. But if folks get aggressive, there are steps they can take to disrupt a lot.<\/p>\n The entire Medium site, for instance, could be taken offline simply by seizing the domain<\/a>. So too with Substack. In one move, everything on those domains would all be inaccessible. In the past, Medium has been blocked or censored by various governments<\/a>, and almost any other comparable site probably has been or could be as well.<\/p>\n I started blogging a bigillion years ago, on Blogger. I did it with zero eye toward it ever being financially sustaining. I saw things I thought were good to collect, or wrote things I wanted to write, and put them online. <\/strong>That was it.<\/p>\n Back then there were no categories, tagging or labels for posts. Whenever I wanted to go into a new topic, I made a new blog. Not ideal.<\/p>\n Later I folded some of those separate blogs into one another and, sadly, never really finished that consolidation process.<\/p>\n Now, in 2025, various social media platforms have made it clear they aren\u2019t going to be very stable, predictable and safe going forward. Meta made it clear<\/a> earlier this year, twitter did years ago (I\u2019ve written<\/a> a number<\/a> of posts<\/a> about migrating<\/a> off of twitter systems) and tiktok has rumors swirling<\/a> around of its no longer abiding by its own editorial judgement anymore either.<\/p>\n As has been true for the last 20 years or so: you control your own site\/s the most, and your profiles on other people\u2019s sites are in their sandbox.<\/strong> Relying on any single company to still support whatever you are doing (staying in touch with friends or customers, marketing your products, services or ideas, and more) long term is a dicey proposition. Building your goals in someone else\u2019s sandbox alone is not ideal, a little like building a castle on sand.<\/p>\n Whether it is connecting with my acting coaching clients<\/a>, projects I\u2019m performing in<\/a>, articles I write, my social media posts<\/a>, or bots posting poetry<\/a> or protest<\/a>, without an unlimited budget: how do you try to spend not too much time and money, but end up with things basically working?<\/strong> It is a good question. Even more so as this has been and can be part of how I afford being a living person (and find work and projects).<\/p>\n Spending some time instead of money has been my recent method.<\/p>\n All projects can typically have two of the following three things: be low cost, be good and get done fast. It’s kind of an axiom of project management that you get to choose only two out of the list: time, price and quality.<\/p>\n I found an EU based way to host my site<\/a>, and just this week I started moving my domains to a less expensive and easier to maintain registrar. Now I\u2019m figuring out how to have ghost<\/a> be how I host my blogging and articles.<\/p>\n I realize now it probably makes sense to do what I did with those Blogger blogs back when I was regularly publishing on them: open up the possibility of hosting my blog on a domain I own and control<\/strong>.<\/p>\n It also probably makes sense to open the possibility of people helping fund it<\/strong> too. Being able to afford to live, and having content I create help with that, would be useful. And I also want the ability to move it all to other servers<\/strong> if and when I need to, without being all sorts of locked into a single company\u2019s offerings.<\/p>\n While the domain ghost.io could be seized, in time I will likely transition my presence on ghost to be coming from my own domain that I own and control. Therefore, I hope to be less prone to going down if a single popular domain that hosts thousands or millions of others is taken down or out of service.<\/p>\n Upsides of ghost include: ghost is open source<\/strong>. So if I want to, I can move to almost any web server hosted anywhere in the world and it should work. I can, without too much hassle, transition to having my blog and articles on my own domain<\/strong>, which also gives more flexibility for how it\u2019s found if the current organization behind the hosting it were to change how their domain is set up. There seems to already be some known ways to migrate from Medium and Blogger to ghost.<\/p>\n Downsides include: getting my work discovered<\/strong> by new people (and the people who know me or my work and are trying to find me), and learning something new. There may be other caveats I discover later.<\/p>\n Substack would likely solve some of the discovery needs, and help my stuff be found, but they have some of the same resilience caveats Medium has, and Substack\u2019s editorial stances<\/a> are\u2026not ideal<\/a>.<\/p>\n I am enjoying the feeling of having something tangible I can do to try to move my digital life to better ways of doing things amid the chaos in the world.<\/p>\n So this, what you\u2019re reading now, is the post announcing my switch\u2026and hopefully I won\u2019t have to revise this article down the road too much. (Like if ghost doesn\u2019t end up making sense and I\u2019d have to change the URL.) Right now, this makes sense: and $11 a month might work for me to move onto a platform for my articles and blogging that I can control more, whatever the future holds. I hope to grow with it and have it all live up to this article\u2019s title, and with it have some online longevity.<\/p>\n \u00a9 Copyright July 15, 2025, David August, all rights reserved davidaugust.com<\/em><\/p>\n David August<\/a> is an award-winning actor<\/a>, acting coach<\/a>, writer, director, and producer. He plays a role in the movie Dependent\u2019s Day, and after its theatrical run, it\u2019s now out on Amazon<\/a> (affiliate link). He has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, on the TV show Ghost Town, and many others. His artwork<\/a> has been used and featured by multiple writers, filmmakers, theatre practitioners, and others to express visually. Off-screen, he has worked at ad agencies, start-ups, production companies, and major studios, helping them tell stories their customers and clients adore. He has guest lectured at USC\u2019s Marshall School of Business about the Internet.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" migrating from Medium (and Blogger) to better options I am shifting my article posting and blogging to a new place: https:\/\/stuff.davidaugust.com\/ (I signed up for the 14 day trial\u2026 not sure yet if investing in paying monthly or annually is a good idea). My reasons are various, including: wanting to be able to increase the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":321933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12021],"tags":[23796,2485],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-321932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-acting","tag-longevity","tag-online"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
Sites Can Get Disrupted<\/h4>\n
Not All Sites Plan to Be Reliable<\/h4>\n
Site Reliability Is Nice<\/h4>\n
![\"gif](\"https:\/\/stuff.davidaugust.com\/content\/images\/2025\/07\/1-0klvrqfzunj8gryw2vw-3q.gif\")
Why Ghost<\/h4>\n