Thanks for the recommendation. However, Threads is not for me. I refuse to use any product from Meta and I would not consider Threads to be a blogging platform from what I’ve read (I’ve never tried to use the app/service).
I’ve been experimenting with it. I have found image export from Ulysses to Wordpress to be hit or miss as well. I’m also experimenting with iA Writer for this purpose.
I would not go with Medium for a couple of reasons:
- It seems to be struggling to find a business model. It pivots every couple of years to the detriment of folks who depended on the previous business model. This may not be an issue for you because it seems like you may not be seeking revenue from your blog.
- Medium often wants me to log in to read their articles, and then after I’ve jumped through that hoop, it tells me that the article is for paid subscribers only. This happens often enough that I have come to avoid medium.com links, as I do quora.com links, not for any ethical reason but because it’s likely the reading experience will be unpleasant.
The latter point is a shame because Medium was founded on offering clean and pleasant reading and writing experiences.
I came here to suggest you consider posting to Facebook, simply because it’s likely to be the platform that will reach the largest audience, even if you’re only seeking to reach folks inside the community you serve. I hear you on boycotting Meta products — but it’s where the people are, so if you want your message to be heard, that’s the place to put it.
I’ve been struggling for years — maybe even a decade! — about whether to continue using Facebok. I post a lot of memes and found media, linkblogging (much of it political), as well as my own original short posts and photos. Literally yesterday I was discussing this with a friend, and telling him about how much I dislike Facebook and yet it’s where I get the most activity on my posts. He said some things that make me think that most of my posts are just silly things that make people happy, and why wouldn’t I want to use the channel with the maximum opportunity to spread that around?
So maybe I’ll just stop worrying and learn to embrace Facebook.
But I continue to post to mitchw.blog and other social services to spread them around. I follow the POSSE philosophy — Post to your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I think of mitch.blog as an archive and publishing channel as much as a destination in its own right.
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Another vote for good old Wordpress. Of course, I don’t expect @Bmosbacker to setup his own VPS hosting (but who knows anyway) so managed Wordpress.com it would be, although it’s not exactly cheap.
It seems managed Ghost now has much cheaper plans which I think you wouldn’t require any of the more expensive plans.
Ghost(Pro) - Official managed hosting for Ghost ($9/month)
I haven’t used it myself, but it tends to come up as an alternative to Wordpress
Thank you for the thoughtful response; it is much appreciated. I like Medium, but after reading your assessment, I may steer clear of the platform.
As to Facebook, you are correct—posting to Facebook and other social media sites would increase exposure, but in two ways. First, my articles would be exposed to more of the community I wish to reach, But second, I would also expose “me.” I become a product, and whatever I share becomes part of a Facebook dossier on me. I don’t particularly like that idea. Additionally, I believe the more one uses social media, the larger the Net footprint for scammers and spammers. Granted, posting on this forum and my blog leaves tracks, but comparatively few and much lighter ones than what is left when posting on social media. Something is to be said for having a light footprint on the Net. 
That said, perhaps I should reconsider to the extent of posting articles and nothing more. 
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I’ll check it out, I’ve heard good things about it.
I have a WordPress site. It doesn’t look as good as my Squarespace site, but going with WordPress would save me nearly $200/year.
You can see the differences:
If I decide to use WordPress, I’ve got to learn how to make a much better home page; the current one is awful.
I use ghost and I like it a lot. It gets more and more expensive as the number of email subscribers go up, but that’s okay if it’s worth it. The editor is good and nice to use.
If you aim to make your website more beautiful in Wordpress(.org), there may be other costs of buying templates.
I assume Wordpress.com would be similar to Squarespace? (Except storage limitations).
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If you don’t want to run your own VPS and you don’t want to use Wordpress.com, there is a middle ground.
There must be other options like it, but I switched from running my own VPS to using CloudWays. The cheapest plan is USD$14 per month, but you can actually host multiple independent instances on that if you want. This is where it scores massively over SquareSpace. I run half a dozen Wordpress sites for various reasons. If I switched them all to SquareSpace, I’d be paying 6x the basic plan cost!
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I use Wordpress hosted by Bluehost. I’m not a web designer, so I invested in Generate Press for a premium theme. That gave me the ability to format a good looking website the way I wanted to without coding.
The price per year is much less than Squarespace.
Yes, you do have to learn some things about using a Wordpress site. I was helped by a book, Wordpress for Beginners. It’s kind of a wordpress for dummies book, which was exactly what I needed!
I import my blog posts to Medium, but do not use it as my blogging platform. I want my platform to belong to me.
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How does wordpress do handling untitled posts, particularly untitled very short posts? That’s a big factor keeping me away from Wordpress and on micro.blog.
I’m not sure of a precise answer, but Wordpress has had “post types” for many years and if I recall, last time I played with them, there were several “short form” post types.
Contrary opinion.
I sell WordPress website design, hosting, etc. I love WordPress. But in your situation, I wouldn’t recommend it.
If you value your time at any sane rate, even the increased price on Squarespace is a very reasonable price compared to the hassle of migrating everything, learning a new system, discovering new edge cases, etc.
Any new system worth moving to is going to cost you at least half, if not more, of what Squarespace is charging you. Many of the managed WordPress hosts have great “intro” rates, and then jack them up for the following years. And you’re likely going to have a dozen or more hours MINIMUM into the migration by the time you do all the research, migrate all the content, iron out all the glitches, re-train yourself regarding the software/edge cases, put redirects into place for old content that’s now named differently, etc.
It’s just not worth it, IMHO.
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Post types seem to simply be signals to certain themes on how to display posts. The posts themselves still have titles, in some cases hidden.
The blogging world seems to believe posts must have titles. The blogging world is wrong. Titles are optional. Micro.blog gets this right.
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This is a really excellent point. @Bmosbacker and I share the chronic illness of habitually investing a great deal of time to find solutions that are only a small amount better than what we were previously doing.
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You make a very black and white statement there. I don’t think the blogging world is “wrong”.
But in any case, you haven’t stated the problem here. A post with the title “This post has no title” may as well take itself literally if the title is never displayed to the user. But… is that the problem you’re trying to solve? Every linear posting system must have an identity for every post. In Wordpress there is a post number under the covers, but for the most part the titles are used in the interface.
Have you tried just leaving the titles blank and setting a theme not to display them? Or are you just philosophically against the concept?
Thank you. Your thoughtful response has me on pause to reconsider. I don’t want to overreact to the price increase. I have a good looking IMHO blog site, which is easy to maintain and upload content to. I’m going to step back to carefully consider the “hidden” cost of changing before making any decisions.
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I’ve not heard of it so I’ll take a look, thanks!