I saw a few posts and headlines that made me do a double-take. Not because they were particularly shocking, but because they are incredibly avoidable.

Ghost is a recently-popular (but actually more than a decade old) blogging platform. People have been moving from Substack (nazis) and Wordpress (bozos) to Ghost. A couple weeks ago, Ghost announced they’re introducing native support for custom fonts, “with even more control over your brand.” WOFF web fonts have existed for 15 years.

Read.cv is a professional networking site, like an alternative to LinkedIn, where users could share their résumés and portfolios. People have been flocking here not just as an alternative to LinkedIn but also for people in need of an online professional profile. They even offered blogging tools. Anyway, the team was acquired by Perplexity, an AI search engine, and Read.cv is shutting down. Read.cv was never about AI and had nothing to do with it.

Adam Mosseri from Instagram announced they’re raising the cap on reel length from 90 seconds to 3 minutes. He says while 90 seconds was initially chosen to focus on short-form video, this change will allow users to “tell their stories” better. Of course, Instagram has always been restrictive. Even when it was only for sharing photos, they could only be square crops. Because they said so.

I went to sleep seeing TikTok’s ban become effective in the United States: being removed from the App Store, delivering alerts in-app to its users, and Oracle preparing to shut down TikTok’s US servers. And then I woke up to news that Donald Trump is taking credit for saving TikTok, despite he himself calling for its ban 5 years ago.

Platforms, man.

Custom typography is easily available if you make your own damn website. You don’t have to wait around for anyone to provide that functionality for you. It’s been here.

Sharing your résumé and portfolio is easily done if you make your own damn website. You don’t have to hang your hat on a platform that will sell out to an AI company.

Publishing video is not terribly difficult—of any length—if you make your own damn website. You can embed a YouTube URL if all else fails, but if you learn how to encode a video for the web on your computer, you can simply upload the file to your own website.

None of us will ever control our own identities on third-party platforms. You relinquish control over your identity when you choose to present yourself on one of these platforms. You can be rate-limited for posting too much. You can be suspended by a bot that determines your behavior is bot-like. The platform can pivot at any time from one thing to another. The entire platform could shut down. You have no control, and jumping from one to another will only mean that you have to do it all again later.

Or, instead of all this, you could learn how to make a damn website.

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