Is it possible to blog in the AI era?
I write short stories every now and then and I throw them online. I also have a tech blog, where I moan about the decisions software I use make and with my “infinite wisdom”, I tell them what they should be doing instead.
I used to host both on Medium, but Medium got greedy. Then it was WordPress, but now even they’re trying to be greedy bastards and use my shit for training AI.
Some would argue that WordPress paid hosting will exempt me from the AI training, but for less than 100 visitors a year, it’s not really worth the expense.
So what is the solution? I ask the greater minds of this community for suggestions.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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WriteFreely is pretty nice, it uses the ActivityPub protocol and is thus a part of the Fediverse - just like Lemmy and Mastodon.
I’m starting to like the idea of a writefreely more and more.
Maybe https://bearblog.dev, very simple but I think enough for writing stories, it’s free, OpenSource and private.
So I’ve been looking at this and my only issues are that it’s not connected to the Fediverse and that it feels too sparse. I would like embedded image support. But thank you for the suggestion.
You can embed images, using Markdown
, same as here in Lemmy, also several themes. But yes, it isn’t part of the fediverse.Another possibility, if you have an own host, is using the Blue Velvet Editor, its a complete wordprozessor which works right in your browser (PC and Mobile), it saves the documents locally in Html format by default. So you can upload it as is to an host, as webpage. Free, private, no account and blazing fast.
https://bluevelvet.ssuiteoffice.com
Screenshot Blue Velvet Editor
Nothing to contribute that has already been said, but very interested in your blog as well!
Care to share your website url? I get interested on it.
Sorry, this got lost in my inbox. Which one, the stories or the blog?
So lets be clear - there is no way to prevent others from crawling your website if they really want to (AI or non AI).
Sure you can put up a robots.txt or reject certain user agents (if you self host) to try and screen the most common crawlers. But as far as your hosting is concerned the crawler for AI is not too different from e.g. the crawler from google that takes piece of content to show on results. You can put a captcha or equivalent to screen non-humans, but this does not work that well and might also prevent search engines from finding your site (which i don’t know if you want?).
I don’t have a solution for the AI problem, as for the “greed” problem, I think most of us poor folks do one of the following:
Now for the AI problem, there are no good solutions, but there are funny ones:
I should point out that none of this will make you famous or raise your SEO rank in search results.
PS: can you share your site, now i’m curious about the stories
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Use the gemini protocol. No need to worry about bots or AI
The gemini protocol seems interesting.
There are gemini to http gateways so the content is probably already crawled anyway.
That’s actually really cool. Not feasible as I want visitors, but cool AF.
In spite of you saying it’s not for you, I think that finding a cheap hosting for your blog is the easiest solution there. With some effort you can export your Wordpress.com site onto an actual free WP engine they sit above. Then, with plugins, here come autoreposts to other social media and whatever you want. Low traffic means you can choose an options with the lowest price.
As a bonus you can also host your portfolio page, get personalized email addresses, a VPN server to wherever it’s hosted, and basically an environment you can put anything to, even your own Lemmy instance.
On the latter - the population of federated platform is very small but super loyal, and also lacking content. So I feel that even if you won’t consider making or renting your own server, establishing your blog here can get you a lot of interactions. Probably, some admins won’t mind if you make your own /c/ommunity for that as long as it’s not abandoned.
Sorry it took me so long to come back to this. Because it was such a valuable reply, I kept it in my inbox so I wouldn’t lose it. Thank you.
You are welcome. Hope you’d get the most from whatever you choose (:
You could buy a cheap vps and host your stuff there with basic html that you could learn as you go if you don’t know already. I think their are pre made licenses that you could put on there to stop ai training. You could also hide pages on it full of garbage data for anyone who ignores the license to get bad results.
OP means Wordpress.com, a hosting website and a constructor using Wordpress.org engine. VPS solves it completely, but they don’t find paying for hosting worth it.
I used github pages, now I use codeberg pages. It’s nice I suggest you try it out (for static content like a blog, it’s great).
If it’s about having your blog serve as AI training, it doesn’t really matter where you host it, it’s going to get scrapped and included in the data.
github pages site?
Github is microsoft.
People forget they use Microsoft Windows to write Microsoft .NET on Microsoft VsCode to then push to Microsoft Github and host it through Microsoft Azure
Why not post your blogs to a fediverse platform? Do they need to be on a separate hosted system? You’ll probably get more people reading and engaging with your posts if you are just posting to a Mastodon instance rather than hosting on a separate web platform and hoping that people stumble across it.
Funny you say that. That’s why I was kinda hoping for FireFish to be the new Tumblr, but that sadly didn’t pan out. But one of my requirements for self hosting is Fediverse integration.
Libre software, WordPress, can’t bans us from removing malicous source code. Medium is service as a software substitute. If you don’t want AI reading your text, don’t share it.
Link to tech blog please
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Maybe Write Freely? You get 3 blogs for 6 dollars a month or you can host it yourself since it’s open source.
https://write.as/pricing
https://writefreely.org/
I’ve been wanting to live write freely since forever, but it just feels sparse.
I’m not sure what features you’re looking for, but Quarto has a lot of really nice features that make it really easy to self host a blog.
You monster! Why are you introducing me to new things to check out? 😭 thank you very much 😂
i dont think there is a good soulution for you.
if its out there, somebody will find it.
you could host your own wordpress instance independent of WordPress.com.
and you could add a robots.txt to tell google to not scan your content, or even completly block the user agents of known search engines.
but blocking search engines is rather counterproductive if you want readers to find your blog.
and even then more nefarious crawlers might ignore the robots.txt and spoof their user agent to find you.