How Drafted started

I did not start with Drafted. I started on Medium.

I will say one thing plainly: I was not consistent. I will not blame the platform for that. The inconsistency was mine.

What I can say is that the limits I ran into there were the platform’s, not mine.

The Four Limits

There were four of them, and they were all versions of the same thing: someone else was deciding.

• Who saw a post depended on the platform’s algorithm and distribution, not on the people who chose to follow me.
• How a post could look was limited. I could not shape the format or the design the way I wanted.
• My audience and my links lived on the platform’s terms. The address, the followers and the archive were all in someone else’s hands.
• How a post could earn was the platform’s call, through its monetisation and paywall rules.

None of that is a scandal. It is simply what it means to write on a platform that you do not own. But it was enough to make me ask where my writing should actually live.

The Same Four, on My Own Site

Each line on the right is something I built on purpose. The earlier posts in this series explain how: no images and a design made of type, a blog that is just files, feeds done properly, no tracking.

Why This Became Part of Dev Universe

Dev Universe is the system around my work, and every part of it has a job. For Drafted, the job is deep thinking and written knowledge: the place where an idea is developed in full sentences, in one place that I control.

YouTube and Instagram are still part of Dev Universe, and they should be. They do different jobs, for different people. Writing was the part where I wanted to own the page it lived on.

If you want the story of how the site itself was made, it starts in Where Drafted began. The rest of this series walks through every other part of Dev Universe, one at a time.

Platforms are good places to be heard. A site of your own is where your work stays yours.