My blog Continuations has been on Tumblr since I started writing it a bit over eight years ago. But now I am seriously considering moving away from Tumblr. There have always been limitations, such as difficulty embedding certain types of content, but I generally worked around those. I liked being part of a network and the positive attitude that Tumblr was promoting – one of the reasons they stayed away from comments, but did support Disqus for people like myself who wanted comments.
Now, however, the drawbacks are beginning to outweigh the benefits, at least for someone like myself who is publishing long-form content. First, Tumblr is not supporting https for custom domains, which means over time my content will be penalized by Google’s search algorithm. Second, Tumblr has started rewriting all URLs. I am sure this serves an important analytic purpose for them but I want my links to point directly to where I set them. Third, Tumblr has started to run ads on blogs. They have made it possible to opt out of that, which I have done, but I fear that with further changes in control (Verizon acquiring Yahoo) at some point that may no longer be possible.
I am not surprised at these developments. I was an angel investor in Tumblr and early on spent a bunch of time talking to David about monetization. My hope at the time was for the ability to “follow with money.” I was envisioning a system in which I could pay a small amount of money monthly or every time my favorite blogs would post something. In other words I was imagining something like Patreon, but integrated into a publishing platform (this was around 2009, so several years before Patreon’s launch).
Now I suppose I could join Medium which has done a good job with long-form content. But it is 2016 and if I am going to make the effort to move Continuations, it will be to something that I control entirely. That could be something like Dave Winer’s 1999.io, which looks great.
But ideally the platform I move to would include a decentralized network. Fred and I have been writing about protocol innovation and blog publishing seems to be one area that is perfect for such a system. In functionality my ideal system would be quite similar to Tumblr + Disqus but would use something like Onename as its identity system. Every post (and comment) would be signed with an identity and it would be possible to follow content based on identity independent of publishing location. For content storage it should be possible to plug in a decentralized file system via IPFS.
So my question is: who is building such a decentralized blog network?
