The best social media alternative is old-school blogging

In recent years, social media platforms' indifference to user privacy, as well as their adverse effects on mental health and the characteristics of amplifying negative emotions, have attracted widespread attention. Many people are starting to look for alternatives, and traditional blogging is becoming an increasingly popular option. If you’re also tired of the hustle and bustle of social media, consider this more private, more focused online expression.

Private group chat in instant messaging software has become a popular way to share photos and videos, but if you want content to get a certain level of exposure, blogging is still an ideal platform. It brings us back to the purer communication methods of the Internet in the early days.

Why choose a blog?

In the early days of the Internet, personal blogs were all the rage. People share ideas, pictures, videos, music, links and other content in their online space.

With the rise of social media platforms, their ease of use, mobile adaptability and extensive social connectivity have quickly dominated, and the user base has also grown exponentially.

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However, as the disadvantages of social networks become increasingly apparent, the slow pace, structure and controllability of blogs have been favored again. Its lower exposure also becomes a big advantage—even if you choose to publish articles publicly, the reading threshold of a blog can attract readers who are truly interested in your content, rather than just for pastime or criticism.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a great choice if you want to switch from social media to blogging. It offers seven convenient post types—text, pictures, quotes, links, chats, audio and video—and the page layout is also similar to Twitter, but with a more emphasis on the blog framework.

Like social media, Tumblr homepage also provides a scrolling stream of information that shows the latest updates on the blog you follow. It also contains many familiar social features: likes, comments, and retweets.

Tumblr combines the speed and convenience of social media and adds additional features to blogs such as custom layouts, personal URLs, and tags. You can also manage multiple blogs and set password protection for some blogs.

Tumblr has a huge art community and numerous fan bases that are worth exploring. The platform is free to use, but you can remove ads by paying $5 per month.

WordPress

Many large websites are built on WordPress. It is similar to Tumblr and offers a variety of post types, but is more powerful, including more features, customization options, layouts and extensions, such as online shopping or booking. You can think of it as an advanced version of Tumblr.

WordPress offers thousands of paid and free templates, where you can create static pages (such as the classic "About Me" page), timeline posts, and even add web forms or voting. Posts can contain images, links, galleries or plain text, and you can also control elements such as comments.

But its social functions are relatively simple. You can follow other blogs and comment and like posts, but that's more basic and unintuitive than Instagram or Twitter (and Tumblr).

WordPress has two ways to use: use the WordPress.com domain for free, but ads will be displayed in posts and dashboards; pay (starting from $11 per month) to get a custom domain, ad-free, video uploading and websites Income-generating function.

Blogger

While not as modern as other platforms, Google's Blogger allows you to quickly create beautiful blogs and even make money from them. But this is a truly traditional blogging model, both pros and cons.

The platform is slightly old and does not have specific post types like Tumblr or WordPress—all content is standard posts, but you can easily add images or links. Blogger, on the other hand, is free, easy to use, and includes many advanced features such as traffic statistics and advertising revenue generation options.

Theme options are slightly less than Tumblr or WordPress, but if you know HTML and CSS, you can adjust your blog code yourself. You can also organize posts with tags and select a variety of widgets – from parts that showcase popular posts to parts that provide contact forms. You can also enable multiple authors to let multiple people publish content together.

Blogger has little social media features. The closest feature is enabling comments and simple reading list features to keep you following the latest content from other blogs.

All features of Blogger are free, but if you want to use your own domain name (not your blogger.com domain), you will need to pay the hosting provider.

Medium

Medium allows you to embed images and other media types in your posts, but it is mainly aimed at writers. If you want to post longer text posts and don't care much about layout and HTML code, Medium is definitely worth a try.

Creating posts on Medium is much easier than WordPress and Blogger. You will find it focuses on simplicity and ease of use. You can quickly add videos and images and apply the format with just a few clicks, but the platform keeps most of the screen blank to highlight the text you are writing.

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Medium offers some social media features, including following other Medium blogs, as well as adding comments and "likes". It doesn't have real theme options, and each Medium blog looks almost the same except for the title picture and the palette of your choice.

Medium is unique in that authors can lock any of their posts, meaning only users who have paid subscriptions to Medium ($5 per month) can access, which also removes ads from the interface. This model also allows writers to generate revenue for their posts with enough traffic.

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