Every Platform You Publish On Is a Rental

Your brand should always be yours. Your name, your work, the people who follow it. No platform should get to own any of that. It sounds obvious written down. Almost nothing online is built that way.

There's a word for how that ownership slips out of your hands: enshittification. Cory Doctorow coined it back in 2022. Most people use it to mean an app got worse: slower, greedier, stuffed with junk nobody asked for. That part's real, but it's only the symptom. The thing nobody says out loud is the mechanism, and the mechanism is the only part you can actually do something about.

It comes down to lock-in. A platform can get worse for you exactly as fast as leaving gets painful, and not one step faster. While you can still walk out the door, it has to keep you happy. The day your audience, your archive, and your reach all live somewhere you don't own, that pressure disappears and the platform starts taking the value back. Reach gets throttled. The terms change, usually in an email you skim. The deal you signed up for quietly becomes a worse one and you find out after it already happened.

None of that is personal, it's just how a lease works. You were never the customer. You were a tenant, and a landlord can always raise the rent.

Once you see it that way, the question stops being whether a platform is good right now. Of course it's good right now. Being good right now is stage one, the part built to get you to move in. The real question is what happens the day it stops being good. Can you leave? Not "download a zip of your old posts" leave. Leave with the whole thing still standing: the live site, on your own domain, working without them.

I make a tool called BlackOps that people use to run their writing and their site. For a long time my honest answer to that question was "almost." The words were already theirs. Everything syncs to a plain folder of Markdown in a git repo they own, so the source was never trapped. But the actual site, the thing readers visit, still ran on my servers. That last layer was a rental, and it nagged at me, because it's the layer that actually hurts to lose.

So I built the button.

It's called Eject. You click it once and it hands you your entire published site as a single zip. Every page. All the images. The SEO files, the sitemap, the robots.txt, the OpenGraph images. Your newsletter subscriber list, sitting right there as a CSV so you walk out with your audience and not just an empty signup box. Every link inside gets rewritten so nothing points back at BlackOps. Drop the folder on a free host like Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages, point your domain at it, and the site keeps running exactly like it looked. Cancel your account the next morning and nothing goes dark. Here's the full walkthrough.

Here's the part that matters most, so let me be straight about it. Eject is for the day you decide BlackOps isn't for you anymore. You click it, you walk out with the whole site, working, and you host it somewhere free like Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages. Nothing stays stranded on my servers. Your pages, your images, your search rankings, your subscriber list, all of it leaves with you. It's a static copy, so the pieces that needed a live server go quiet and the newsletter form gets pointed at your own email provider on the way out. That's the honest shape of it. But you never leave anything behind. I'm not asking you to trust that I won't trap you someday. I took the trap out.

Try this on anything you publish on right now. Ask it to hand you your whole site, every page, every image, your subscribers, as a folder you can host anywhere for free, on your own domain. Most can't do it. The few that can won't make it easy. That gap, the space between wanting to leave and actually being gone, is the cage. It's where the rent increases hide.

You'll probably never click Eject. Most people won't, and honestly I'd rather earn the stay than count on the lock. But the button being there changes what sits under the whole relationship. The only way I keep your business is by being worth it, not by making the exit expensive. You hold the deed. You aren't renting anymore.

So when people argue about whether enshittification is greed or late capitalism or bad founders, I think they're skipping past the mechanical part. It's the rent going up once you can't move out. A nicer landlord was never going to fix that. Neither was waiting on a regulator. You either own the place or you're renting it, and for the one layer here that was still a rental, now you own that too. Your brand was always supposed to be yours. The site it lives on finally is too.