Writing something down forces you to fully understand it. When the idea is on paper, you can see all the missing assumptions and leaps in logic. It's common to start writing, do some research and find out that your original point was wrong.

This is a good thing.

You are now less wrong then you were before, and have something you can share so that we can all be less wrong.

Even if you don't learn anything new in the process, we don't find our interests and hobbies by magic: We read about them from someone else. Simply writing about what you did yesterday — even if you are not an expert on the topic — can be very valuable to the right person.

Why a blog:

Blogs have a long shelf-life: Social media posts vanish in hours, but a good blog post can stay readable and relevant for decades. Your work can have a lasting impact on lots of people rather then being briefly noticed by a few.

Since posts are mutable and long lived, you don't have to aim for perfection. It's perfectly fine start with a single sentance and expand it over time: Blog posts are living documents that grow alongside your ideas.

Articles can build on each other, cite sources or provide hundreds of pages worth of detail. None of these are requirements, but having the option allows actual learning and nuanced discussions to take place.

You can write a detailed response to someone else's detailed opinion instead of just throwing insults: meaningful human interaction that just isn't possible on "social" media.

You can own your identity: If you register yourname.com (costs around around $10/year) you aren't tied to any particular service. Switching hosting provides is completely seamless: None of your readers will even notice anything's different.

Compare that to being "@yourname on Twitter": If the platform tries to extort you, gets sold to a horrible person, or vanishes without a trace... You are out of luck. Sure, you could move to "@yourname on Mastodon" but at the price of loosing your all readers and breaking every link to your work.

On your own website, you can customize everything, and there's no risk of a company forcing a terrible redesign on you. Instead of being yet-another-post-feed, you can have your own unique place on the internet

Posts can be indexed by Google and friends: A niche post can become the top search result and keep that spot for years. Social media does have some indexing, but it is very hit-and-miss.

You can use RSS or mailing lists to keep readers updated without having to worry if the algorithmic feed is showing your work... although, of course, you can link to your site on social media.

The alternative...

On social media, if a post doesn't immediately go viral, it's effectively dead and will be burried by the algoritic feed.

The only thing that people ever see are short and anger-inducing posts: They have to be short or readers will get distracted all the other content next to them. Posts also need "engagement", and anger is a great motivator.

Social media rewards posting short (and often misleading) content with a broad appeal. Meaningful intellectual discussions are punished: some places have character limits that prevent you from even trying.

Niche topics don't fare any better: Unless it can find a large audience in the first few hours, it won't be shown to anyone. When someone who is interested does come along, they often won't be able to find it because the search feature doesn't work.

It's not an accident that these places are full of bad political takes and endless arguments. They make money from advertising: They want to keep the greatest number of people the site for as long as possible... even if they become horrible places to be.

Hosting:

This site is hosted on a VPS and made with handwritten HTML with a custom site generator to create the index pages. I'd only recommend this if you are planning to do other things on the server: Otherwise it's overkill and more expensive ($3.50/month) then other options.

If you are willing to write some HTML, Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages will host a site for free. Because it's just some slightly fancy text files, switching providers in the future will be painless.

Update 2026-01-14: I now have a companion article describing how write your own website in HTML. Reading it is highly recomended unless you want to use a premade blogging tool with a generic theme.

There are also plenty of blog specific hosting services that let you get by without typing a single angle bracket. However, I haven't used any of them so I can't give specific recommendations.

If you bring your own domain, don't stress to much about the choice: You can always switch without affecting your readers.

Closing notes:

Your first blog post will probably be bad. That's ok: Your second one will be better, and your third will be even better. All that matters is that you wrote something and put it out into the world.

Writing is a skill: you will get better with time.

While social media can be super toxic, most people on the internet are nice: The vast majority of what I receive is praise, "Thank You"-s and polite corrections. Out of hundreds of emails, I've only gotten a single piece of hate-mail.

... but please: Don't use an LLM to generate posts for you. I want to interact with a human and not a robot. Even if it's got a few spelling mistakes it's still yours and still has value. An LLM generated post is worthless: If I wanted to read AI slop, I would have generated it myself.

If you feel inclined to ChatGPT something, don't:

Post what you would have used as the prompt. That's the important part.