👉 INTERVIEW WITH ANTON, THE GUY WHO CREATED PUBLIC.ME Anton is the guy behind this new cool blog service Public.me where you publish your posts by sending an Apple iMessage. This site is using the service. I wanted to know a bit more about him and I am very proud to present an interview with him. Of course the whole thing is done via iMessage. ? Andreas: Hi Anton, tell everyone a bit about yourself. Who are you? 👉Anton: Hi Andreas. I’m a software engineer, originally from Ukraine, based in the US for the past 10+ years. I started programming long time ago, but somewhere around 2011-2012 fell in love with the web technology(philosophically). I’ve build countless small side projects since then. Nowadays, I still try to make various projects, but most of them somehow connected to the web - and the ideas that everyone can have their own page and share what they have to say. ? Andreas: Before you created Public.me you made another cool blog service called Montaigne.io where users can blog via Apple Notes. Both services are free to use. Are you doing this for fun or are you hoping to make money from this later on? 👉 Anton: Good question. I think of it stages. 1. Make something interesting cool. 2. Make something people use. 3. Make something that people use and is sustainable. 4. Make something that people use and brings some profit. Whenever I have a project I never know which stage it will reach. But reaching any stage makes me happy. I’m already happy when I can make something and it works and I see result of my work. If other people start using it - it makes it even more happy. So that is mostly how I think in general. You mentioned montaigne.io. Like you said it’s free, but has some paid features. I didn’t even reach stage 3 for that project. Some people pay for extra features, but at the moment I still loose money. So if I can reach self sustainability for any of my projects - it would be great, because that would mean I can run them for years to come. ? Andreas: So I guess you have a day job 😊. I work as a journalist in Stockholm. I’m no techie, but I really like simple blog services. Why do you find it important to give people the opportunity to publish themselves online? 👉 Anton: I wrote about some of the things that are important to me here https://blog.montaigne.io/principles So publishing is important for several reasons: 1. Publishing is some form of creation. Which is the opposite of consumption. Increasing creation is always a good thing in my mind. 2. Plurality and decentralization are also important. 3. Ownership is important. With my services I can take them down but original content (Apple Notes or messages in iMessage) will still be on the users’ computers and phones. They can take their creation and republish using another service. I think this is correct relationship. User and his/her content are the most important things and the service is secondary. It does feel that golden age of traditional text publishing is a bit behind us. We used to hafeelany blogs and RSS and things like that. Now the landscape is obviously different. So maybe I do like old publishing as a romantic and nostalgic idea. It’s interesting to think how Twitter changed in the past 16 years. Before it was mostly about broadcasting simple and short text messages. And now it’s a full blown platform with all forms of media and with algorithmic feed that pushes content onto us. So 2024 in that regard is very different from 2012. And I definitely have nostalgia for the older ways. ? Andreas: Talking about social media and how it has changed. Do you think old school blogging is coming back? 👉 Anton: I think this question is better to answer with the research and checking some numbers on all blog numbers and social media. But without checking the numbers I would say “old school blogging” is not coming back. Unfortunately. But that in terms of perception and percentage of created content. We probably still have way more blogs in absolute numbers than 15 years ago(needs verification), but because other mediums and platforms grew way more – blogs are more irrelevant. There are many reasons for that. One is distribution. Modern platforms enable this trade for you: where you get access to distribution, but they lock you into their platform and algorithms and so on. And distribution is somehow extremely important thing. It’s how many people will see your work. And how to get new people to see you your work. Eg RSS was a good open protocol that was solving consumption problem and a bit of “distribution issue”(with other protocols) for people a decade ago. But those days seem to be gone. Hard to predict future and if we will have some other options that are not controlled by corporations who have their own incentives. ? Andreas: Last question. A big and philosophical one. What do you wish for next year? 👉 Anton: I think for Ukrainians it’s the most simple question nowadays. End of war in Ukraine. But in a proper way. My wish would be the dissolution of russian state. So not only the current war can end but we could actually say “never again”. Obviously I don’t think dissolution of russia will happen next year. But you asked about my wish. So that would be it. ? Andreas: Thank you so much for doing this Anton. It was fun. 👉 Anton: Thank you, very good questions. Interesting to think about some of these topics on a Sunday 😅 those difficult questions and not all of them have optimistic answers at the moment. But it is what it is.”