Hosted vs Self-Hosted
I’ve recently dabbled with microblogging, and I quite like it. Twitter provides an excellent source of output when I’m feeling bored and have no one to talk to (which sadly happens a lot), and Tumblr extends on that, working as a brain dump to paste bits of information, information which I find highly interesting but I’m unsure if anyone on my MSN contact list would be quite interested in.
The question is should I just go with Twitter and Tumblr, or should I attempt to host an equivalent of them myself? Laconica and Gelato comes to mind.
The plus side to using a hosted service such as LiveJournal or Twitter or Tumblr is that it provides an existing community to build upon and therefore allows for your content to be easily discovered by others. Whereas the positives of a self-hosted service, such as running your own WordPress blog, or using Gelato in place of Tumblr/Twitter, is that there is a strong sense of ownership. I am in charge of my own content and not locked into any system. Sure, there is always import/export services provided by most of these services nowadays, but nothing is able to set my heart and mind at peace other than having direct access to the database itself.
I’m an indecisive person, and this doesn’t make the decision making process any easier.
