Most of us build online on land we rent. Here’s what that cost me, and how I moved.

For the eight years I was building my boat, I ran a WordPress blog, The Gleda Project. Tens of thousands of words, hundreds of photos, written most days. I gathered a little community there and made friends.

Then Gleda was finally launched, and I found out I couldn’t take any of it with me.

I picked out some highlights by hand. I made a note of some email addresses. What’s left is a few pages on the Wayback Machine.

Some more tech-savvy readers will question that. There were, and are, ways to export everything out of WordPress they’ll say. I know. Perhaps, with the time and the know-how, it might have been possible. For me, it would never have been easy. Keeping the site up was an option, but self-hosted WordPress is notoriously demanding: constant site and plugin updates, constant battles with hacking and spam. Add the cost of keeping the domain name, and that tipped the balance. I took it on the chin and moved on.

But it’s easy to get sucked in, isn’t it? The people behind these platforms are expert marketers. “Come and use our tool. It’s free. It’s brilliant.” And once you’ve put years into a place, leaving gets harder every month. That’s the sunk cost fallacy, and I’d fallen for it without noticing.

I called this “land we rent” in the subtitle, and I mean it literally. Renting means someone else makes the rules, and can change them. Someone else has the control. Someone else can pull the plug whenever they like. Rent space from Substack, Medium or Beehiiv, and you’ve set up shop under someone else’s roof. Build a subscriber list there, or start earning, and the cost of leaving goes up again.

It’s a lesson I should already have learned. But in 2024, I set out to earn a few pennies on Medium. I posted regularly behind the paywall and built a following of 1.4K. In April that year I earned $321.26. Happy days I thought. Finally, I’d cracked it.

Five months later my monthly earnings were $52.17, and they kept dropping into single figures. Medium had changed the Partner Program rules. I stopped writing there not long after.

There’s no point harping on. There are plenty of places up for rent, and you make your own choice.

But so far, I’ve ignored the place where renting has the biggest sunk cost of all: social media.

I’ve stayed away from it. My feelings about Meta and X make that easy. The only place you’ll find me is Bluesky, and I’ll come back to that in a minute.

I know many people have years of their lives on these platforms: their photos, their memories, their friends. Some of them allow you to download an archive. But it’s a bunch of files you can’t really use anywhere else.

It may be that you’re already too far down the road to say goodbye. You may think you’re getting a fair deal. That’s fine, and I’m pleased for you.

But if you find yourself on a signup page, eager to start writing to the world, here are the things I check first now:

Can I get what’s mine out again?

Can I get it in a format I can use somewhere else? (I think Markdown files are best.)

Can I keep it running without it becoming a second job?

If the answer to any of those is no, I’d look elsewhere.

Recently, I chose micro.blog as my home online. It gives me a permanent home on the internet that I fully own and control. The words, photos and links I create there belong entirely to me. Best of all, because I can use my own website address (neilhawkesford.co.uk), I’m never locked in. If I ever decide to leave, I can instantly pack up all my content and my web address and move elsewhere without losing my audience or breaking my links.

Micro.blog can cross-post to Bluesky. In other words, every post you see there goes up on my own site first. The original lives under my own roof, and Bluesky just gets a copy. It’s a doorway to my site, not somewhere I live.

I also cross-post to Medium, and the same applies. They just get a copy. I only do it because I still have an audience there, and it’s an easy way to get more eyes onto my work. No more paywall, though. Every post is free, and every post ends with a sign-off inviting people to join my mailing list, the one that’s all mine.

Building on rented land has cost me a lot of time and effort over the years.

But no more. This time, when the winds change, I’ll be taking it with me.