Alternatives

I don’t really like WordPress. It’s clunky. Too malleable in some areas and too stiff in others.

I’m intrigued by alternative blogging platforms like Micro.blog, Bear, and Montaigne, and yet I continue to use WordPress, despite the fact that I don’t really like it all that much. Why? Mostly apprehension, I think. Things that have lasted a long time (21 years, in the case of WordPress) tend to continue lasting, a weird phenomenon called the “Lindy effect” after the diner in New York where comedians first started discussing it. (Not made up.) In all likelihood, WordPress will still be chugging along in two decades. For all their youthful charms, where will Micro.blog, Bear, and Montaigne be in 2044?

The irony of it all is that the whole point of having a website and a blog is to “own your turf,” as they say. Small platforms tend to make this easier than large ones. With Montaigne, for instance, you write and store all of your posts and pages in the Notes app on your iPhone. So if the service does collapse, none of your writing goes away. I honestly have no idea what would happen to my blog posts if WordPress went away.

Maybe WordPress makes it easier for people to find your site. But these days, almost nobody finds a blog via a web search. They arrive via links from social media, mostly. So that point is probably moot.

WordPress pros, then:

• Reliability
• Longevity

Cons:

• Annoying to use
• Opaque (to me, at least)
• Cookie-cutter
• Not sure what would happen if it died

It may be time to learn some basic coding so I can build my own site from the ground up. Can’t be that hard, right?

Update: The other day I learned about Pika, another simplified blogging platform. Man, now I’m really starting to reconsider WP.