I want to talk about something fundamental that shaped how I built Jottings: the idea that your content belongs to you, not the platform.
It sounds simple. Maybe even obvious. But it's worth saying out loud because most social platforms don't actually work this way.
When you write on Medium, Twitter, or most blogging platforms, you're creating on borrowed land. The platform owns the rules. They can change their terms, alter algorithms, shut down features, or—in extreme cases—delete your account and everything you've built. You have access to your content only as long as you follow their rules and they stay in business.
That doesn't sit right with me.
The Lock-In Problem
I've seen this pattern repeat in my own life. A platform launches, everyone gets excited, you spend months building an audience and publishing great work. Then the platform pivots, changes its algorithm, or gets acquired. Suddenly your reach disappears. Or worse, the platform dies and takes your archive with it.
This happened to Google Reader. It happened to StumbleUpon. It happens constantly.
When you're locked into a platform, you're not really a writer or creator—you're renting a storefront that can be taken away at any moment. That's not freedom. And I don't think that's what the internet should feel like.
What True Data Portability Means
When I started building Jottings, I made a conscious decision: you should be able to take your content and leave anytime.
This isn't just about having an "export" button that nobody uses. It's about building the entire platform around the principle of data ownership.
Your content is yours from day one. Every jot you write, every piece of metadata, every connection you make—it lives in a format that's open and standard. We don't hide your content in a proprietary database that only we can read.
You can export everything anytime. No artificial waiting periods. No degraded exports. We give you your complete archive in standard formats: JSON for structure, RSS for syndication, HTML for publishing. You can take that data and do whatever you want with it.
No vendor lock-in by design. Jottings generates static sites. That's important. It means your published site isn't dependent on our servers or our APIs. Once we generate your site, it's just HTML files that can live anywhere—your own server, GitHub Pages, any static hosting provider. You can literally run Jottings, export your content, and host the generated site yourself without us. You have a real backup that's immediately portable.
RSS: Your Content, Syndicated
RSS feeds are one of my favorite features of Jottings for this reason. We generate a full RSS feed of your content automatically. This isn't a nice-to-have feature. This is a fundamental technology for independence.
With an RSS feed, your content isn't trapped in our walled garden. Readers can subscribe to you directly through their RSS reader. Your content gets copied into their archive. You're not dependent on our algorithm or our notification system to reach people.
RSS is the original portable format. It's been around since the early 2000s. It's based on open standards. And it works whether Jottings exists or not. That's the kind of technology I want to build on.
Trust Through Freedom
Here's something that might sound counterintuitive: I think we're better as a business when we make it easy for you to leave.
If Jottings survives and thrives, it should be because we're genuinely useful and people choose to stay. Not because they're locked in. Not because extracting their data is painful or impossible.
When you know you can leave easily, you're actually more likely to invest time and energy into your site. You don't have that anxiety in the back of your mind that you're building on borrowed land. You trust the platform more because you know you're not trapped.
This is why I'm committed to keeping data portability at the core of Jottings. It's not a feature I'll add later or deprecate when it becomes inconvenient. It's fundamental to how the platform works.
How We Practice This
It's not enough to talk about data ownership. We have to actually build it.
Your Jottings site stores data in a standard format. We give you access to all the APIs and tools you need to read and export that data. The static site generator that powers your published site is the same tool we'd use if you exported your content—there's no hidden magic that only we have access to.
When you request an export, you get a complete package: your content, your metadata, your site configuration. Everything. No "we only support exporting the last 6 months" or "basic exports only" nonsense.
We've built redundancy into the system. Your content gets multiple backups. Your site is published to a CDN that's independent of our servers. There are multiple ways to access your data. If Jottings disappeared tomorrow, you'd still have your static site published on Cloudflare's network for some time. You could download that. You could regenerate it. You wouldn't lose anything.
The Bigger Picture
Data portability isn't just about technical formats. It's about philosophy. It's about believing that the internet should work differently than it does.
Right now, the web is dominated by platforms that optimize for retention and lock-in. They own your data. They own your audience. They own the relationships. You're just borrowing access.
I want to build something different. A platform where you're the owner. Where your content is an asset you control. Where the relationship is based on trust and genuine value, not lock-in.
Jottings is built on that principle. Come because it's useful. Stay because you want to. Leave whenever you want—and take everything with you.
That's the kind of internet I want to be part of building.
Want to try it? Start publishing on Jottings today. Your content is yours. Always.