Self host your website and do POSSE (Publish once and syndicate everywhere else). You can use Hugo or other Static Site Generators (SSG). Then republish your articles on other platforms like Medium, Substack and use canonical links so the search engines know your website is the source of the article. This means none of the policy changes of platforms effects you. Not even if the platform dies. Another thing is that you can experiment by isolating audiences. Like experiments with provocative titles, writing style being simple vs very direct and detailed technically. Also, I republish everything to Medium but only share developer stuff to Dev to and Hashnode. You can do all of this stuff cos you have a safe haven called your own website.

Tips:

- Start small and progressively improve or change things. Instead writing everything from scratch for instance, find a SSG with tons of free themes. Find the one which fits your needs. This means you can start right away without doing a full blown software project. And it reaches a time where you will need more features or need changes. Then and only then work on your own theme.

- Writing and Keeping the website alive is always the hardest part. Not the part of creating a website.

- Don't worry about the article counts or traffic. Everything will happen organically.

- When republishing, find platforms which have a high chance of discoverability for your older content. You website as people starts seeing will always have regular traffic even if it just 50 or something cos your website link is more likely to be discovered more than the platforms which almost always prioritise new content.

I find medium useful like that, for example I get people's comment and likes to an older content of mine in Medium. Meanwhile with Dev.to, they are always on a rat race for new content. Write your content and in a week it will never get another view. This pushes you to write new articles all the time. But I like to write some articles on my pace and not be a karma farmer.

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If you still want to use a platform, I recommend Bear Blog. It's a small project, made with love and respect for Indieweb. Good luck! :)