Own­ing It

For the second time now, someone mentioned to me that it is kind of paradoxical that my newsletter, which is called “Own Your Web”, is not hosted on my own server or under my own domain but on Buttondown.

And yes, they are right. I realize that this is kind of not walking the talk. Do I really own my Web in this case? I thought about this as well and my plan is – and actually always has been – to first move the archive over my own domain and, eventually, to a completely self-hosted solution. In the past, I had cross-posted a few of the newsletter issues to this website. But that’s not the real deal, right?

However, the whole newsletter management and sending will very likely always stay on a newsletter service like Buttondown. Such services are just so much better when it comes to things like the signup experience, list management, deliverability, automation, privacy, data security, etc. than anything anyone could ever build themselves with a reasonable amount of effort. And it also made getting started with the newsletter so much easier because it lowered the barrier of actually kicking off the project to a minimum. Which is an incredibly important factor when you’re starting something new that might not work.

For my first newsletter (rest in prototypes…), I used a self-hosted Mailtrain instance, for example. And although I got it to work and learned quite a bit about sending email newsletters, it was so much more work to get it up and running – and to maintain. And this brings me to an important point: Owning your web doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to build absolutely everything yourself or that you publish everything on your own site exclusively. But rather that you stay in control of your content and of how and where you want people to find it. And, most importantly, that you bring your ideas to life – and own them.

That being said, I believe it still totally makes sense to publish, document, and aggregate as much of your work and other information as possible on your own site. In a way, your own site is the central place where all your actions, traces, and threads on the web converge. The supermassive black hole at the center of your galaxy, around which everything revolves.

So yeah, I definitely get the message. Shit don't change until you get up and move your newsletter archive to your own domain.

EDIT: Done. :)

ownyourweb.site now redirects to the subdomain newsletter.ownyourweb.site.

This change took me one coffee and adding three TXT and CNAME records in the config section of my domain registrar.

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