I have been blogging for over seven years and spread my content over a half dozen different platforms. The problem is that many people have no idea where they can find all of my content. What is worse, if someone stumbles upon some of my old content they are unlikely to find my more recent thoughts. To remedy this problem, I have aggregated my blog posts going back to 2014 into my new blog website: moreequalanimals.com. Content from bytemaster.github.io, dan@steemit, dantheman@steemit, bytemaster@medium.com, and dan@voice.com is now available on this new site.
My recent work in the pursuit of liberty has led me to appreciate the need to maximize individual and group independence. This means maximizing the independence of my own blog. I want a blog that anyone can replicate and host on their own machine. I want a blog that doesn’t depend upon maintaining an account on any single service.
I want to build a following that no single corporation can take away in an instant. I want to know if my content is being shadow banned. I want a decentralized way of reaching my followers, and email is the most decentralized and universally adopted platform I can think of; so please subscribe to my mailing list so that no one can come between us as we pursue freedom together.
You would think that as the founder of two social media platforms Steem/Hive and Voice that I would choose one of these platforms for my blog. I certainly have a large audience on these platforms, but none of these platforms are currently suitable for someone who wants to have as much independence as possible. There are many features that I wanted to add to Steem/Hive and Voice that their respective teams are either slow to implement or don’t fit within their business models.
For example, I have long wanted the ability to organize my posts by tags and to display related posts and referenced posts at the bottom of every post. The idea is that visitors should be able to quickly discover other content I have published. I have also wanted a simple and portable way to link to other posts. Back before I left steemit, I was working with the team to build such features. Unfortunately, the team never completed the work.
I have chosen to build my blog on top of a static site generator so that my content could be hosted on IPFS. I am currently using Jekyll so it can be hosted via github pages, but am investigating porting over to Hugo which supports generating pages with relative urls which is better suited to IPFS. IPFS is the most decentralized content addressing and distribution protocol I am currently aware of.
I am currently using Disqus for comments and on-site engagement, but one day I hope that Voice will offer similar capabilities with higher quality discussion. Note that even though I founded Voice, it is now being run by Salah Zalatimo, the former chief digital officer of Forbes. I am working with Salah to make voice.com the premier blogging platform. Wouldn’t it be great if voice provided the capability to export your content to a Jekyll blog! It would have saved me hours! Hopefully one day Voice will make it easy to import content from Jekyll and Hugo as well!
For those of you who are curious about the name of my blog, check out Why I named my blog 'More Equal Animals'Why I named my blog 'More Equal Animals'
In Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others which contradicted the intent of their animal utopia. This blog is about designing a true democracy that actually makes us more equal without the pitfalls of Animal Farm..
