I’m entertaining the idea of starting a digital privacy and security blog. As a matter of fact, I am self hosting it right now, but mainly for friends, family and acquaintances. It’s super basic, more rants than articles honestly, 🤣
Since the only 2 social networks I have are Lemmy and Mastodon, I’ve been avoiding allowing sharing to Facebook, Twitter and other mainstream SNs.
My wife thinks I should just host it on a cloud and share it everywhere with the argument of, and I quote, “the platforms you use are already full of people as paranoid as you. If you really want to bring your knowledge and experience to others, you should allow us to share to the platforms full of people oblivious to the dangers you constantly slam us with” (which is absolutely true. I’m a thorn on their side, lol.
What do you guys think? Should I add features to share to those places? Would you if it was you? Under no circumstances will I post on any of them, and if I allow to share from my blog, my inner circle would be the one doing the sharing.
I do want to help spread our gospel, but I think that most people in those platforms are just to far gone to even care. I don’t even know what to think anymore. I’ve only written 2 articles so far anyway, so it’s not like I’d be the New York Times of privacy or anything.
Those share buttons are trackers themselves. So it’s not about “supporting” those websites by publishing content to them, it’s about undermining the privacy of your readers and doing the opposite of what you preach, and “supporting” those websites by feeding them much more valuable user data. As another comment said, just put a button to copy the permalink and let them paste themselves if they want to share.
As for you sharing a link on the mainstream social media platforms yourself, I’d actually encourage that. Cory Doctorow auto-publishes links (not content) to his articles on as many social media platforms as he can (sorry, can’t find the article in which he describes it). The point is that he still retains control over his content by hosting it himself, he controls the (lack of) trackers and ads, and gaining traffic from these platforms is still to his and his potential readers benefit. Bending your rules a little to reach more people and maybe even convert them to be more privacy-aware is fine.
That’s been my main debate. I didn’t think of that possibility,but it makes sense. Adding those buttons would go completely against what I’m trying to share in my blog.
I’ll start researching FOSS options to add a way to auto post links like you mentioned. Since I haven’t used any of them in years, does anyone know if I would need to create a user in each of them? I’d probably do it with the blog’s name, not personal if it comes to that.