No Landlord, No Eviction, No Algorithm

Rent a space from a landlord and the landlord can raise the rent, change the rules, or ask you to leave. Post only on a platform and the platform plays the same role, it is a landlord with an algorithm instead of a lease. Own the domain and none of that applies, there is no landlord standing between you and the page you built.

There is also no eviction, a platform can suspend an account overnight, a domain you pay for and control cannot be taken that way. And there is no algorithm deciding whether your own page gets shown, when someone types your page’s address, it loads. Larry Chiang’s Web12 framework treats this as the whole reason to publish home first before syndicating anywhere else.

Platforms are still useful, they just should never be the only place a piece of work lives. A page that exists only as a social post is entirely at the mercy of a ranking system nobody outside the company understands.

A page that exists on your own site can be linked to from anywhere, shared anywhere, and it still answers when someone visits. That independence is not dramatic day to day, most weeks nothing happens to remind you it matters.

It matters on the day a platform changes its policy, shuts down a feature, or bans an account for no clear reason. No landlord, no eviction, no algorithm is just another way of saying own the page before you worry about anything else.