Why I decided to self host my blog
Hello readers of my own blog (who, let's be honest, were basically just my friends and family)
I've decided to self host my blog instead of publishing on substack.
This is for several reasons. The main one is that substack has now become enshittified. It now has a algorithmic feed with infinite scroll, which to me is basically the worst thing you can do as a content aggregation site. It is now actively going against its original goal of publishing long form content to increase people's attention span and inform them.
On a personal note, I am officially starting a masters by thesis in AI part time (with the blessing of work), and all my energy that I would spend on writing substack articles will be put towards writing my masters. I'm not sure what the thesis topic will be yet. I have thought about AI's impact on jobs, specifically the empowerment vs replacement dichotomy. I also have a strong interest in strengthening international cooperation on AI. We already have governance of other dual use technologies, which is already inspiring existing research into how international AI governance would work.
Back to the reason for the blog. I also wanted a place where I can just jot down ideas and little thoughts, without having to turn them into proper articles. And I want people to only see it if they actively check on it. I'm not trying to make money from writing my blog, so I don't care about engagement or subscriber count or anything like that. As such, some of the posts here will be shorter and less polished. I will still post comprehensive AI essays that don't fit into my master's thesis (I've got one on AI safety institutes I'm currently writing). I also want to post more general content, and maybe some travel logs when I go on vacation to US and Sverige(Sweden) in a few weeks. It'd be nice to look back on various thoughts or posts, and not have to use any social media platform to do this.
In terms of self hosting, It's actually a lot easier than I thought. I'm not a web developer, and I followed the guide at landchad to get the website up and running, then found a static site generator (I use pelican because I'm a python developer).
Cheers - Ben