Portability is optionality

Posterous launched in 2008 with a promise of simpler blogging. Open your email app, compose a message to post@posterous.com, type your thoughts, and hit send to create a new blog and your first blog post, in one fell swoop.

“Just email us,” said the Posterous tagline. Nothing could be easier.

Two years later, Posterous tried to entice bloggers “to switch from dying platforms.” One could import their blog from Windows Live Spaces (launched in 2004, shuttered in 2011 with a 99-day notice). Or Xanga (Founded in 1999, closed in 2013). Or Vox (Launched in 2005, shut down in 2010 with a 28-day notice).

Only, Posterous would soon be in the same position. Five years after launching, the simplest blogging platform would publish its last email—closing its doors April 30, 2013, with a 75 day notice.

It’s not that Posterous was particularly unstable. Death comes for us all, startups all the faster. It’s that your presence on the internet, your published ideas in blog posts, and your followers in email newsletter subscribers are more important, more predictable and stable, than any random new internet platform.

What matters, far more than where you publish, is whether your content can be moved easily after receiving a 28-day notice. That’s the difference between being stuck and having optionality.

The art of creating options

Trying new things is delightful. Being stuck with old things, not so much.

Growing olives, say, is fun when the crops are bountiful, less so during a drought. An olive farmer might like a way out of losses, in such a scenario, or a way to guarantee prices if oversupply floods the market.

The first known mention of options was published over 2,400 years ago in Aristotle’s Politics. Thales of Miletus predicted there would be a bountiful olive harvest, in Aristotle’s telling, so he paid advance deposits to rent the limited number of olive presses, and waited. Come harvest time, demand outstripped supply, and Thales sublet his leased olive presses to cover the unseasonably high demand.

A similar strategy, today, protects over 50,000 American farmers who purchase options on their crops. They can’t switch, mid-season, from corn to wheat. But they can insure themselves against extreme price swings, buying optionality for their business.

Futures are a great way to win a fortune—or lose one in a hurry. They’re best used to hedge your bets. When you’re all-in on one investment, an options contract can make sure you’re ok if your bet goes south.

Your ideas and writing have value. You believe in them enough today to write before demand materializes, building up an audience one article, one newsletter, one reader at a time.

Yet your bet will only pay off if your written asset is still there when demand materializes. If you’re subject to the whims of platforms, your content could disappear in a corporate merger or startup dissolution.

What is the best CMS?

So where should you publish your content? Which blogging tool should you use?

The perennial answer is: It depends.

I’ve used everything: Tumblr, WordPress, Ghost, and now an 11ty-powered static site. Each switch required moving my domain to the service, and copying over my content to the new CMS. Inevitably, the shine would wear off, the cracks would appear in the new workflow, and I’d be tempted to greener pastures. Queue moving the domain and content again.

I’m of the opinion, today, that the CMS doesn’t matter—as long as it lets you take all of your data with you in an export. All that matters is portability.

Use what you're familiar with (something that applies to code and CMS choices as much as any other part of your tech stack). If you’ve used a CMS for a while and like it, stick with that. If that CMS seems to be imploding, well, you could pick another. Choose something you like, something that feels fun, something that inspires you to create and write.

Then trust, but verify: Make sure that you can take your content with you when you go.

If you start your blog on Ghost then decide to leave, there’s a clear Export tab in settings to take your posts in a format that’s easy to import elsewhere. If you start on Google Sites instead, it’s possible—but much more complicated—to export your site in HTML format then copy and paste it into another CMS.

Hopefully you bet on a platform that sticks around. But while you’re taking the time to migrate, also buy optionality: You think this platform looks great, but also would like a way out of your investment if the tides turn. 

Own your domain, and you can always rebuild

Worst case, without options, a 3rd-century BC olive farmer could switch crops next year. As long as they had their land, there was always tomorrow.

Your domain name is your digital land. It’s yours as long as you remember to pay a dozen or so dollars a year to maintain it. 

You don’t even have to think too much about which domain to choose. Matthias Ott put it well, after sharing tips on picking a memorable domain name: “But if your domain doesn’t check any of those boxes, so what? It’s still yours. And thanks to redirects, you can always change your mind later.”

You can use that domain on a WordPress blog today. Switch it to a Ghost blog tomorrow. Buy a new domain, and redirect your original one to your new home. It’s your domain to do with as you choose.

That gives you the ultimate optionality online. As long as you own your domain, you can always start back over again without losing your audience—even if it means tediously copying content post by post. You’ll always have an address on the internet, even if the structure and design of the house at that address changes over time.

As Craig Mod put it recently, when sharing his new Bluesky profile: “Hedging my bets because the only god is your own domain name?” Social networks and blog platforms come and go. You might not even get your preferred handle on a new service. But your domain, that’s your ultimate optionality online. Pair that with simple content exports, and you can always take what comes.

Own your domain. Export your content. Then write.

The New York Times learned the value of content—and the impermanence of blogging platforms and content management systems—the hard way.

In 1983, the Times sold their electronic archival rights to LexisNexis. Not so valuable, when libraries and researchers were the only ones who’d use the content. Impossibly valuable, eight years later, when the internet arrived. It took until 1994 to get the rights back, then another couple years to launch nytimes.com.

That first site was handcrafted, literally. “There's no content management system,” described David Rosenthal on the Acquired podcast. “They literally make a GIF of an image that they create in the art department,” making online content look like the print newspaper, but also setting up a copy/paste nightmare for their future team.

By 2008, the New York Times team built the Scoop CMS (and, presumably, had to painstakingly migrate archives from images). A decade later that, too, was replaced by in-house-developed Oak editor, this time built on a more future-focused stack.

The CMS was fungible. The only constants were the content and the domain.

That’s your recipe for permanence and optimality on the internet. Worry not as much about the tools you choose as much as in how easily you can switch if need be. That’s why I’ve built Buttondown around exports, so you can take your emails, subscribers, surveys, and comments alike if you ever choose to move. It’s also why Buttondown supports custom domains for your emails and archives alike. It’s your audience; if you need to move, taking your audience and data should be the easiest part of the process.

“You can be just a little bit paranoid about your data,” wrote Evan Spence when Posterous shut down. “I want to have all my curated links, thoughts, observations, and other paraphernalia under my control.”

Hear, hear.