There is a particular comedy in being your …

There is a particular comedy in being your own publisher, your own platform, your own little one-person media empire.

The upside is freedom.

The downside is that when the site falls over, there is no calm tech team in matching hoodies quietly restoring the kingdom while you sip coffee and think writerly thoughts.

It’s just you.

You and the critical error message.

Which is how I found myself this morning laughing at the strange bargain I’ve made with the open web. I left Substack last year because I didn’t want to build my house inside someone else’s walled garden. I wanted sovereignty. My own domain. My own server. My own little patch of digital ground.

And then, naturally, my patch of digital ground went face down in the mud.

The irony arrived by way of an app called Kerouac, which, with a name like that, was always going to get my attention. It bills itself as a studio for pro bloggers, pulling together posts, drafts, ideas, pipelines, feeds, and whatever other fragments of a writing life are scattered across the web.

I signed up for the free trial. No credit card. Low commitment. Maximum curiosity.

My first impression: too much structure. Too many panes. A little too much productivity inducing anxiety for my taste. But it also has a discovery feed, and that led me to JA Westenberg, whose work I’ve followed and liked for a while.

From there I ended up back in the Substack flow, reading her notes, posts, linked videos, and newsletters all stitched together in one clean stream. I had to admit, grudgingly, that it worked. There was cohesion. A centre of gravity. A single place where the work gathered and pointed outward.

And then I clicked over to my own site to ponder its cohesion.

Critical error.

Beautiful timing, really.

There I was, admiring the elegant flow of a platform I had left because I didn’t want to be owned by it, only to be reminded that independence comes with maintenance costs. If you want the freedom of the road, you also have to know what to do when the van breaks down.

This is the bit we don’t always talk about in the romance of the indie web. Owning your platform is noble. It is also admin. It is backups, updates, plugins, hosting, monitoring, and occasionally staring at a broken homepage while wondering if “pro blogger” is too generous a category for a man whose blog is currently unconscious.

Still, I don’t think this is an argument against owning your work.

It is just a reminder that ownership is not an aesthetic. It is a practice.

You don’t get to claim the open road and then complain there’s no concierge.

The other timely thing was Westenberg’s post about the humble Moleskine notebook. I’ve been having my own notebook renaissance lately, using paper again as a visual thinking tool. Less dashboard, more scratchpad. Less system, more contact.

Maybe that is the shape I’m after online too.

Not more platforms. Not more clever pipes.

A notebook with a door.

A place where the thinking can happen in public, where the fragments can gather, where the trail is visible, and where, yes, I occasionally have to crawl under the bonnet myself.

That might be the real bargain of the indie web:

freedom, but with spanners.

---

Update:

I wrote the above earlier this morning. I have since connected my blog to the app. And I must say, I really like the insights page.