Write the docs meetup: digital sovereignty for writers - Olufunke Moronfolu¶
(One of my summaries of the Amsterdam *write the docs* meetup).
Full title: digital sovereignty for writers: your data, your decisions.
“Digital sovereignty is the ability to have control over your own digital destiny: the data, hardware and software that you rely on and create” (quote from the World Economic Forum).
What do writers want? Mostly: to be read. For this you could for instance start looking for (commercial) blogging platforms, searching for the best one. And after a while you start looking for a different one. On and on. You can run into problems. Substack might ban your newsletter. A google workspace domain being blocked. A Medium story getting deleted without feedback.
Tim Berners-Lee intended for the web to be universal and open. But now it is mostly a collection of isolated silos.
There are some questions you can ask yourself to test your sovereignty. If your current platform deletes your account, is your content completely lost? Second question: can you export your work in some portable format (like markdown).
If you are a technical writer, you have to do the test twice. Once for your own content and once for your company’s documentation.
Own your content. Most sovereign for your own website/blog would be hugo/jekyll or other static generators. In the middle are (self-hosted?) wordpress sites. Least sovereign is something like linkedin/medium/substack. For company content, confluence/notion would be least sovereign. Wiki.js/bookstack middle. The best is docs as code like some markdown in git.
So: review the platform’s policy. What is the ease of export? Do you have control? What’s the stability? Do you have an identity there? Perhaps even a domain?
Own your identity. Having your own domain is best. If you’re some-platform.com/name, your identity goes away if the site disappears.
Decide how to share. Sovereign would be an email list, an RSS feed or something like the POSSE approach (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere).
Build for the future: build something. Start. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Your own domain name and a single static page is already much more sovereign than a million followers on a site that could vanish tomorrow.
If you want to do more, join the “independent web” (indieweb, https://indieweb.org) movement.
Personal note: I’ve got my own domain. This is a blog entry that ends up in an RSS/atom feed. The site is .rst files in a git repo. Statically generated with Sphinx. So: yeah, pretty sovereign :-)