heya yall
I’m starting a blog at the moment and was wondering if anybody knew the best place to do it…
Medium seems to be interesting but not sure how much customisation and community there is?
And then tumblr i feel like people are turning away from + has been bought by data vultures
Ideally would be a place with a strong community, privacy as a strong principle and customisable
Cheers!
Honestly I’m not sure there’s really any sense of community wrt blogs anymore…the entire universe of them is a bit too big for anyone to feasibly seek out things to the point that you’re better off just doing a post and then boasting n sharing it everywhere, which is mostly what people do now regardless of where they put it.
Medium is decent fwiw, but its a bit annoying especially since they started doing nag shit getting free readers to pay after a while or some bollocks so I tend to avoid it where I can…good for big “here is a well researched informational essay” type posts though. Tumblr is probably not the best spot for it honestly, its a bit too casual. Honestly, imo there’s not much wrong with just creating a Wordpress (dot com) blog and going from there. The free themes are solid and it did me nicely until a friend hooked me up with some free server space to have a self hosted blog. Try different services, see what sticks for you. WPCom’s editor is okayish but will most likely serve you perfectly fine and the app lets you post on the go n such.
my advice would be to make a wordpress and promote it to death with images / screencaps / videos on Instagram with the hopes of pulling people who comment on your posts into the wordpress version
mmh fanks guys - so similar thoughts then.
would love to see a smaller, curated community where people search for blogs from within, around particular topics maybe.
i think i’ll just start on WP and see what happens - i’m promo-d out from my day job where i have to shout over a million other people online - so will take it very slow haha…
start a thread here in Everything Else and cross post for that inner circle you can build off of 
but yes i feel you about promo, i think just about everyone is promo-d out in some sense or tired of being advertised to. i think that’s why forums can be cool cus we can create relationships where we actually LEARN each other’s tastes over time and be like - what that person posts is rad! i trust their judgement, so no need to push with flashy images/bullshit adverts. i’d say post your best work on a thread here with the hopes of getting feedback. we’ve talked before about getting a writers community going, your thread could be the catalyst! might open it up to other peoples blogs/posts too…
for sure, tired of giving and receiving haha.
cheers mate will do if it’s any good 
Do not go medium. My advice would be to not go to any hosted blog service at all, actually. I know it’s more of a learning curve with self hosted but you get all the flexibility you want with that and won’t be tied to any vagaries of third party services (like Medium changing their platform over and over again and being all naggy now. No one likes that.) But this depends on how technically savvy you are and how much you’re willing to pay (honestly, a $5 digital ocean droplet is enough for most).
The benefits of this might not be apparent initially, and honestly when starting off the biggest blocker is the actual writing rather than any admin stuff, so do that first, and do it anywhere, as long as the platform lets you have control over the domain, and you can export everything.
I’d be 100% down for a dedicated thread for posting new blogs and sharing feedback etc, letting each other know what bits we liked/didnt like and what can be improved etc. tbqh
the irony of using 555 to ask how to start a blog… the lack of blogs is why 555 was started. this is your blog, YOU LIVE HERE NOW
hey @softcrunchylanding, @nickecks, and @avery, actually @chalravens makes a great point…should we just start publishing our long form pieces here under Music General? maybe it’s not a perfect solution but 1) there’s already a built-in audience here (i.e. us), and 2) whatever new traffic we drive to the site only fortifies the 555 user base, lending more credibility to the previous requests to build out a separate “Writing” sub-forum.
maybe we give it a shot, pick a record to properly review after new releases drop this Friday, and see what happens?