Online Longevity

migrating from Medium (and Blogger) to better options

I am shifting my article posting and blogging to a new place: https://davidaugust.ghost.io (I signed up for the 14 day trial… not sure yet if investing in paying monthly or annually is a good idea).

My reasons are various, including:

• wanting to be able to increase the amount of control I have over where people read my work and
• hopefully (fingers crossed) avoid possibly having my stuff taken down by companies or governments that don’t like what I’ve written or said.

If you just wanna join me in where I plan to post going forward, and don’t want the almost stream-of-consciousness-of how I got here, you can just go there, hopefully subscribe, follow, sign-up, and you can not read the rest of this.

Sites Can Get Disrupted

I’m not yet a big enough “content creator” to likely be targeted by various authorities for hurting their feelings. But if folks get aggressive, there are steps they can take to disrupt a lot.

The entire Medium site, for instance, could be taken offline simply by seizing the domain. So too with Substack. In one move, everything on those domains would all be inaccessible. In the past, Medium has been blocked or censored by various governments, and almost any other comparable site probably has been or could be as well.

I started blogging a bigillion years ago, on Blogger. I did it with zero eye toward it ever being financially sustaining. I saw things I thought were good to collect, or wrote things I wanted to write, and put them online. That was it.

Back then there were no categories, tagging or labels for posts. Whenever I wanted to go into a new topic, I made a new blog. Not ideal.

Later I folded some of those separate blogs into one another and, sadly, never really finished that consolidation process.

Not All Sites Plan to Be Reliable

Now, in 2025, various social media platforms have made it clear they aren’t going to be very stable, predictable and safe going forward. Meta made it clear earlier this year, twitter did years ago (I’ve written a number of posts about migrating off of twitter systems) and tiktok has rumors swirling around of its no longer abiding by its own editorial judgement anymore either.

As has been true for the last 20 years or so: you control your own site/s the most, and your profiles on other people’s sites are in their sandbox. Relying on any single company to still support whatever you are doing (staying in touch with friends or customers, marketing your products, services or ideas, and more) long term is a dicey proposition. Building your goals in someone else’s sandbox alone is not ideal, a little like building a castle on sand.

Site Reliability Is Nice

Whether it is connecting with my acting coaching clients, projects I’m performing in, articles I write, my social media posts, or bots posting poetry or protest, without an unlimited budget: how do you try to spend not too much time and money, but end up with things basically working? It is a good question. Even more so as this has been and can be part of how I afford being a living person (and find work and projects).

Spending some time instead of money has been my recent method.

All projects can typically have two of the following three things: be low cost, be good and get done fast. It's kind of an axiom of project management that you get to choose only two out of the list: time, price and quality.

Why Ghost

I found an EU based way to host my site, and just this week I started moving my domains to a less expensive and easier to maintain registrar. Now I’m figuring out how to have ghost be how I host my blogging and articles.

I realize now it probably makes sense to do what I did with those Blogger blogs back when I was regularly publishing on them: open up the possibility of hosting my blog on a domain I own and control.

It also probably makes sense to open the possibility of people helping fund it too. Being able to afford to live, and having content I create help with that, would be useful. And I also want the ability to move it all to other servers if and when I need to, without being all sorts of locked into a single company’s offerings.

While the domain ghost.io could be seized, in time I will likely transition my presence on ghost to be coming from my own domain that I own and control. Therefore, I hope to be less prone to going down if a single popular domain that hosts thousands or millions of others is taken down or out of service.

Upsides of ghost include: ghost is open source. So if I want to, I can move to almost any web server hosted anywhere in the world and it should work. I can, without too much hassle, transition to having my blog and articles on my own domain, which also gives more flexibility for how it’s found if the current organization behind the hosting it were to change how their domain is set up. There seems to already be some known ways to migrate from Medium and Blogger to ghost.

Downsides include: getting my work discovered by new people (and the people who know me or my work and are trying to find me), and learning something new. There may be other caveats I discover later.

Substack would likely solve some of the discovery needs, and help my stuff be found, but they have some of the same resilience caveats Medium has, and Substack’s editorial stances are…not ideal.

I am enjoying the feeling of having something tangible I can do to try to move my digital life to better ways of doing things amid the chaos in the world.

So this, what you’re reading now, is the post announcing my switch…and hopefully I won’t have to revise this article down the road too much. (Like if ghost doesn’t end up making sense and I’d have to change the URL.) Right now, this makes sense: and $11 a month might work for me to move onto a platform for my articles and blogging that I can control more, whatever the future holds. I hope to grow with it and have it all live up to this article’s title, and with it have some online longevity.

© Copyright July 15, 2025, David August, all rights reserved davidaugust.com

David August is an award-winning actor, acting coach, writer, director, and producer. He plays a role in the movie Dependent’s Day, and after its theatrical run, it’s now out on Amazon (affiliate link). He has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, on the TV show Ghost Town, and many others. His artwork has been used and featured by multiple writers, filmmakers, theatre practitioners, and others to express visually. Off-screen, he has worked at ad agencies, start-ups, production companies, and major studios, helping them tell stories their customers and clients adore. He has guest lectured at USC’s Marshall School of Business about the Internet.