Owning Your Output

By John Hardy
January 12, 2026 | Series: openweb

I keep returning to the early web’s ideas because they offered a clean technical answer to an ordinary human problem: publishing something and knowing it will still be there tomorrow. You could put a document on a server and give it a URL, and that link would mean something. The page lived on your server, and the link stayed stable because it pointed to a file you controlled.

For a long time, I drifted away from that. Social platforms made publishing effortless by removing hosting work and day-to-day site upkeep, and they bundled identity with distribution and comments while the feed carried the rest. The friction was low and the audience was already there, so the trade felt reasonable even as I gave up control. That convenience has a cost because the platform controls the surface where your work appears and how long it stays visible. Your writing lasts only while it fits inside someone else’s system.

Self-publishing, for me, is a technical choice. Owning a domain and shipping plain HTML means I decide what appears and how long it stays online, with presentation under the same control. A piece of writing stays available while I keep it there, and a page I host will still exist tomorrow if I decide it should.

This way of working also changes how I think about the archive. When everything lives on my own site, I set the rules of what matters and how it surfaces. It is a collection of files and links that I am responsible for. That makes the archive legible and inspectable. It becomes something I can maintain for years without renting it from a platform.

This series is about that choice and treats publishing as infrastructure. I want to write in a space that I control, using tools that do not disappear when a service shuts down. Plain HTML still exists alongside stable URLs and open protocols. I am building with those constraints because they keep the writing mine and keep the system open to anyone who wants to read it or take it elsewhere. This is why I build this system and publish here.

Tags: web, philosophy, selfpublishing, openprotocols