Migrating Off Hashnode

The past few years I’ve been using Hashnode as the CMS and frontend for my blog, Buried Treasure. It’s like Substack but more tailored for developers and technical blogs. It’s always been on my list to get off of it and make my own self-hosted blog but alas my blog was never that important to me and the time saved was worth the risk of hosting my content on someone else’s website.

That changed this year starting around January 2025 when I started taking the content creation more seriously. I’m no influencer nor desire to be one but I like the idea of having a catalogue of content, actively being a creator rather than a customer, and having control of the information/narrative. Since then, you could say it was inevitable that I’d move off of some hosted CMS to owning my content.

This isn’t meant to be a technical post but for those curious, the new blog is just a basic nextjs app hosted on vercel. It’s all open source in my personal website monorepo - including all the mdx files for each post (feel free to roast it or make PRs).

One interesting side effect of the port is that my blog is wicked fast now. That was never the point but I love fast software. The website is also much clearer and fits the general branding/aesthetic of some of my other websites associated with my person. Far less bloat.

Food for Thought

Hosting a blog is super easy (and free) so it’s almost a no-brainer but if I end up making more youtube videos on my channel then I’ll have a much harder time getting it fast and cheap. The Youtube monopoly is a great example for small scale creators of a software moat. Basically the same as Hashnode’s moat but with a significantly higher bar (video hosting vs text hosting). For large creators though, Youtube’s monopoly is built on it’s extremely defensible 3-sided marketplace of advertisers, viewers, and creators. Perhaps if the DoJ was at all effective (which doesn’t seem to be the case regardless) they’d have Google sell Youtube rather than Chrome 😕