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Why SSB is a great publishing platform

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By Cheng Guo
1 min read

Currently SSB is viewed mostly as a social network platform but I think what it really excels is being a publishing platform. SSB is the only publishing platform I can find satisfying the following features.

  1. Content belongs to the author and not associated with a company A company’s policy could change and you may not like it forever. For example, they could add ads to your content and they could stop promoting your content unless you pay. Migrating to another platform is always a headache.

  2. Minimal effort to publish so that the author can focus on writing This excludes self-hosted solutions such as wordpress and static sites generator.

  3. Content and link is permanent This excludes all company hosted solutions as a company can be and will be shut down or you may want to migrate. It also excludes self-hosted solutions as you could forget to pay your server or domain name and get content/link lost.

  4. Readers can comment on the posts Most static sites need plugins as a work around.

  5. Readers can follow you and you get your reader base This excludes many publishing platforms.

  6. Free to start publishing Excludes many company hosted solutions and block chain based solutions.

Beside the above features. SSB also has some additional big plus points for some authors:

  1. Supports markdown

  2. Content is timestamped

  3. Unable to delete

At the moment there are also some problems with SSB. They are the reasons I haven’t advertised SSB to my friends to write blogs.

  1. As most readers currently are on the old web publicWebHosting=True is essential. Currently, there is no desktop client setting publicWebHosting=True by default or letting non-tech users set it as true easily.

  2. The 8K message size limit. I requested to increase it on github already.

  3. No easy to use desktop client supports editable and deletable posts.

  4. No easy to use desktop client supports easy way to backup and recover identity.

  5. A not essential but nice to have feature is the possibility to let the author receive tips from readers or even publish content behind paywalls.

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This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.