I was Foursquare user number 14,488. I signed up on June 2, 2009, and for the next ten years I “checked in” almost everywhere I went. Not for points or mayorships, but for the location history that synced to my calendar. The big moments were there: my wedding in Palm Springs, my son’s birth at Sint Lucas Andreas in Amsterdam. But the real value was the small ones. A restaurant I’d forgotten about. A bar that closed years ago. A random Tuesday afternoon in a neighborhood I hadn’t been back to since. Ten years of context, quietly compounding.
Then Foursquare killed the calendar feed.
They’d warned it could happen. The feeds page had carried that disclaimer for years. But I’d been logging so consistently, for so long, that the data felt like mine. It wasn’t. It was theirs. And one day, they decided it wasn’t worth maintaining.
So I built my own.
Where/When is an iOS app that does one thing: saves your current location as a calendar event with GPS coordinates and a reverse-geocoded place name. All on-device. No account. No server. No data shared with anyone, ever. It’s been in the App Store for years now, and the thing I value most about it isn’t the design or the features. It’s that nobody can turn it off but me.
A Dozen Websites
I have a dozen websites. Not for clients. For me.
A film collection tracker for my 3,200+ film collection of digital and physical discs. A vinyl collection app that tracks value via Discogs. A comic book tracker. A movie poster database with 70,000 pages. A blog. A portfolio. A meeting cost calculator. A margin calculator. A photography portfolio. A bookshelf. A LEGO instruction browser (that freed up so much space in my son’s closet). An interactive archive of VFX shot cards from a film I worked on in 2002.
Every one runs on Cloudflare. Every one is backed by git. Every one is something I can move, modify, or shut down without asking anyone’s permission. The data lives in databases and repositories I control. The domains point where I tell them to point.
This sounds like overkill. It probably is. But I didn’t build them all at once, and I didn’t build them to prove a point. Each one started because I wanted a tool that worked the way I wanted it to work, displayed the data the way I wanted to see it, and didn’t depend on a company’s roadmap, business model, or continued existence.
Platforms vs. Foundations
The conventional wisdom is that you should go where the audience is. Post on Medium, publish on Substack, build on Shopify, host on YouTube. And there’s truth in that. Distribution matters. Discovery matters. You can’t reach people from a server in your garage.
But there’s a difference between using a platform and depending on one.
I publish a newsletter on Substack. I’m not naive about the tradeoff. Substack gives me distribution, a subscriber list, a reading experience I didn’t have to design. In return, I’m a tenant on someone else’s land. If Substack changes its economics, its algorithm, its politics, or its existence, my writing lives or dies by their decision.
The difference is that everything I write also exists in a markdown file in a git repository on my machine. The subscriber list is exportable. The words are mine. If Substack disappears tomorrow, the writing survives. The platform is the amplifier. The repository is the foundation.
That distinction matters more every year.
The Enshittification Cycle
In the past decade, I’ve watched platforms enshittify in real time. Twitter became X and the API went from free to prohibitive. Reddit locked its API and killed third-party apps. Google killed Reader, Podcasts, Stadia, and about two hundred other products people built workflows around. Medium changed its paywall model three times. Bandcamp got sold twice.
Every one of these stories has the same structure. A platform creates value. People build on it. The platform captures that value. The people who built on it have no recourse.
The pattern is so reliable that you can set your watch by it. The only question is when, not whether.
AI on Your Own Land
The next version of this problem is already here, and it’s bigger than social platforms.
Right now, most people building with AI are doing it through cloud APIs. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google. You send your data up, you get your answers back, and your entire workflow depends on a company’s pricing, rate limits, and continued willingness to serve you. Sound familiar?
Last week, an open-source model running on a Mac Mini scored higher than frontier commercial models on graduate-level reasoning benchmarks. Not in a lab. On a $600 computer sitting on a desk. The frontier is moving onto consumer hardware.
We’re entering a world where the intelligence itself can live on your own land. Not just your writing, not just your data, not just your websites, but the AI that processes it all. The same principle applies: use the cloud for what it’s good at, but make sure the foundation doesn’t depend on a subscription you don’t control.
Sovereignty
I’m not saying everyone needs a dozen websites and a local language model. I’m saying that the things you care about most, your writing, your collections, your data, your creative work, should live somewhere you control. Not exclusively. Use the platforms for what they’re good at: reach, discovery, convenience. But make sure the source of truth is yours.
For me, that means markdown files in git repositories, deployed to infrastructure I manage, backed up to storage I own. It means sync scripts that pull data from external services into my vault so that if those services disappear, the data doesn’t. It means my health data flows from my Apple Watch through an automation pipeline into my own notes, not just into Apple’s servers. And increasingly, it means running the tools themselves, not just the data they produce, on machines I control.
For you, it might be simpler. A blog on a domain you own. An email list you can export. Photos on a hard drive, not just iCloud. A local backup of anything you’d be devastated to lose.
The principle isn’t about technical sophistication. It’s about sovereignty. Who controls the thing you made? If the answer is a company you’ve never met, in a boardroom you’ll never enter, making decisions you’ll never influence, you’re building on rented land.
The Hedge
I build on my own land because I’ve been doing this long enough to know that everything else is temporary. The tools change. The platforms change. The companies change. The only thing that persists is what you own, what you control, and what you’ve built on a foundation that doesn’t require someone else’s permission to exist.
My dozen websites aren’t a flex. They’re a hedge. Every one of them is a bet that the thing I care about will outlast the platform that could have hosted it.
So far, that bet keeps paying off.