I sure hope so! I missed the serendipity of web 1.0 and then in the past couple of years I realized it’s all still there! In fact, there or more sites than ever behind the sheen of these giant companies.
I hope this next iteration brings a proliferation of tools that can help regular folks take part in that (personal sites, blogging, guestbooks, etc) without getting trapped in a walled garden or social network.
We’re trying to do our part to help at our company (Good Enough) with https://pika.page/
Keen observation! We needed to start somewhere with our messaging, and that place is basically to reach out to people in my own position. Given that familiarity, we could build a message and test it out in this niche.
In some regards I'd love for that niche to be large enough to provide a good revenue stream for our team. The features we'd build would be more obvious to us, and they could be designed for a more technically-skilled audience.
That seems unlikely, though. And while building for the technical folks is enticing, I also would love a world where more people from various backgrounds are blogging. I would love to be able to go read 20 years of blog posts from my parents, or to read blog posts that my children write as they enter adulthood.
We've already done some user testing with non-technical folks and there are, of course, glaring challenges. Building for regular people who'd like to write will be hard work, but we have a team with lots of experience in this area!
Hear, hear! We greatly dislike the ad model and greatly dislike the data-mining model. Let's normalize paying for a thing that you enjoy, as well as companies going for self-sustaining rather than giant exits.
And if you have the technical know-how and time budget, by all means set up your own OSS blog on a server and enjoy!
Big fan of what you're doing with PostOwl! Hereby feel encouraged to build that hosted version. More blogging options to fit more blogger personalities means more blogs. We want that!
At the moment we don't have an import tool. We know that it's pretty important, but launch before you're comfortable and all of that. :) Likewise, if I were moving I would like some redirection options. These things are definitely on our radar.
Self-hosting is certainly an interesting avenue. Our model is very SaaS at the moment, but nothing is off the table.
https://pika.page
It's humane and built for people, not businesses. It's quite lovely in our opinions!