Blogging in the AI era

Host your own stuff. With this little load you can do it on your own hardware with very little resources.

I think you should clarify the problem first.

Privacy? You lose your privacy the moment you publish your blog anyway.

Is it visibility? You never expected Google to show your blog in most cases.

AI training? You could self-host and hope companies respect your robot.txt. But what's the actual problem if you released your blog to the public in the first place? Anybody could've copy & pasted your blog also before this AI era.

There are two good options: Host your own blog yourself, or join a blogging platform that isn't corporate. I personally use BearBlog but I've heard good things about Write.as as well. These two have free blogging options and don't sell your data. If you want to host it yourself (which is safer), check out Hugo.

Ultimately, bots scrape the entire internet and there's no guarantee they will honor robots.txt of a particular website (which tells bots what they are and aren't allowed to do). If it's on the internet, people can scrape your content and there isn't much you can do about it. That shouldn't stop you from writing or blogging, just don't post very personal data.

Also, feel free to join us on !blogging@programming.dev!

So lets be clear - there is no way to prevent others from crawling your website if they really want to (AI or non AI).

Sure you can put up a robots.txt or reject certain user agents (if you self host) to try and screen the most common crawlers. But as far as your hosting is concerned the crawler for AI is not too different from e.g. the crawler from google that takes piece of content to show on results. You can put a captcha or equivalent to screen non-humans, but this does not work that well and might also prevent search engines from finding your site (which i don't know if you want?).

I don't have a solution for the AI problem, as for the "greed" problem, I think most of us poor folks do one of the following:

• github pages (if you don't like github then codeberg or one of the other software forges that host pages)
• self host your own http server if its not too much of an hassle
• (make backups, yes always backups)

Now for the AI problem, there are no good solutions, but there are funny ones:

• write stories that seem plausible but hold high jinx in there - if there ever was a good reason for being creative it is "I hope AI crawls my story and the night time news reports that the army is now using trained squirrels as paratroopers"
• double speak - if it works for fictional fascist states it works for AI too - replace all uses of word/expression with another, your readers might be slightly confused but such is life
• turn off your web site at certain times of the day, just show a message showing that it only works outside of US work hours or something

I should point out that none of this will make you famous or raise your SEO rank in search results.

PS: can you share your site, now i'm curious about the stories

If it's about having your blog serve as AI training, it doesn't really matter where you host it, it's going to get scrapped and included in the data.

Maybe Write Freely? You get 3 blogs for 6 dollars a month or you can host it yourself since it’s open source.

https://write.as/pricing

https://writefreely.org/

Use the gemini protocol. No need to worry about bots or AI

Why not post your blogs to a fediverse platform? Do they need to be on a separate hosted system? You'll probably get more people reading and engaging with your posts if you are just posting to a Mastodon instance rather than hosting on a separate web platform and hoping that people stumble across it.

Libre software, WordPress, can't bans us from removing malicous source code. Medium is service as a software substitute. If you don't want AI reading your text, don't share it.

WriteFreely is pretty nice, it uses the ActivityPub protocol and is thus a part of the Fediverse - just like Lemmy and Mastodon.

i dont think there is a good soulution for you.
if its out there, somebody will find it.

you could host your own wordpress instance independent of WordPress.com.

and you could add a robots.txt to tell google to not scan your content, or even completly block the user agents of known search engines.

but blocking search engines is rather counterproductive if you want readers to find your blog.

and even then more nefarious crawlers might ignore the robots.txt and spoof their user agent to find you.

In spite of you saying it's not for you, I think that finding a cheap hosting for your blog is the easiest solution there. With some effort you can export your Wordpress.com site onto an actual free WP engine they sit above. Then, with plugins, here come autoreposts to other social media and whatever you want. Low traffic means you can choose an options with the lowest price.

As a bonus you can also host your portfolio page, get personalized email addresses, a VPN server to wherever it's hosted, and basically an environment you can put anything to, even your own Lemmy instance.

On the latter - the population of federated platform is very small but super loyal, and also lacking content. So I feel that even if you won't consider making or renting your own server, establishing your blog here can get you a lot of interactions. Probably, some admins won't mind if you make your own /c/ommunity for that as long as it's not abandoned.

You could buy a cheap vps and host your stuff there with basic html that you could learn as you go if you don't know already. I think their are pre made licenses that you could put on there to stop ai training. You could also hide pages on it full of garbage data for anyone who ignores the license to get bad results.

Nothing to contribute that has already been said, but very interested in your blog as well!

What about https://writefreely.org/

There are reputable hosters like https://text.tchncs.de

Link to tech blog please

Care to share your website url? I get interested on it.

I used github pages, now I use codeberg pages. It's nice I suggest you try it out (for static content like a blog, it's great).

Maybe https://bearblog.dev, very simple but I think enough for writing stories, it's free, OpenSource and private.

• A privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform
• No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets. Just your words.
• This is a blogging platform where words matter most.
• Shun the bloat of the current web, embrace the bear necessities.
• Looks great on any device
• Tiny (~2.7kb), optimized, and awesome pages
• No trackers, ads, or scripts
• Seconds to sign up
• Connect your custom domain
• Free themes
• RSS & Atom feeds
• Built to last forever