What would you recommend to a family member or friend who wants to start a blog?

The Forty years on, the tools for independent publishing have never been more abundant, yet the path through them is more winding for non-technical writers. A facilitated workshop to map the landscape together, and to figure out what the missing piece looks like. gets harder the more concretely I picture her. I want her to keep her words on her own machine, under her own domain, free to move. That rules out Substack, Wix, and Notion before we begin. The honest path, markdown files, a static generator, a host, is the one most developers take, and the one most non-developers cannot take alone.

The choice is one of workflow, not platform. And the workflow has to be honest in a particular way: simple enough to start in a single afternoon, but built so the user can see how it works and grow into it. Low floor, high ceiling, no walls. She would start simply by writing, yet the entire power of browsers and internet protocols is not hidden magic, but a reward for digging deeper and hacking more. This workflow is the right shape, but no tools enable both the simple start and the creative growth.

36 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee made the website a publication medium anyone could use, in principle. 24 years ago, Aaron Swartz and John Gruber refused to bring writing "down to the level of the computer," and Markdown made the notation humane. 18 years ago, Tom Preston-Werner created Jekyll and let people "blog like a hacker." Files became a website, for those who could run a build. 3 years ago, Steph Ango wrote "file over app" and gave the principle its name: the app is ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last. Obsidian made that principle ordinary for non-developers writing notes.

The publishing half of "file over app" is the landmark still missing. The Cambrian explosion of editors, generators, and hosts has not closed the gap. If anything, the path for a non-technical writer is more winding now than when there were only three options. Forests work because the roots are shared, slow, and underground. Independent publishing is root infrastructure for the open web, and most of the pieces already exist. What's missing is the maintenance, the connecting, the path-clearing that turns scattered tools into something a non-developer can walk. And I'd argue that is what directly determines how diverse and free the internet is.

I'd like to map the landscape with you. For seven years, I have built infrastructure for independent publishing in the Chinese-speaking community, before I learned to think about tools rather than platforms, about what fits a person rather than what scales to a market. Those are blind spots only different perspectives can cancel out, each starting from someone's own real experience, and that is what I would like you to bring.

We'll leave with a shared reference: what's good for whom across the current tools, where the honest trade-offs are, and a sketch of what the missing landmark might look like. And if you have been meaning to start a site of your own, you'll leave with a plan to start one.