I’ve had the idea for this post sitting around for a while, but I’ve not gotten around to writing it up and publishing it. With the chaos that’s going on at WaPo and some other news regarding some other high-profile individuals I felt it was time to actually go and write this.

The Social Web is an incredibly powerful distribution tool, especially for things like news articles. I wouldn’t be building an app for it if I didn’t believe that. It combines the ability to distribute to a large audience with all of the features of social media as well as total ownership over what you’ve written.

Unlike a Substack or Medium or what have you, publishing on a Ghost or Wordpress site (for example, there are others out there in both camps) means that you own everything. You get to choose how it’s distributed, you get to choose what’s published, you get to choose who sees it. You’re not at the mercy of some company to keep up your site.

With large media organizations being bought up by billionaires and run into the ground as tax write-offs, real people can work together to create new organizations built on the Social Web without having to rely on billionaires to distribute their content. You’re no longer at the mercy of Elon, Zuck, Jeff, or anyone else—what you publish is yours and nobody can take it away from you.

This applies to everyone from me, some random person on the internet posting their ideas, to larger organizations like Platformer (or maybe someday the Harris campaign, who for some reason decided to spin up a Substack).

Whoever you are, whatever idea you have, and however you want to share it: own it.