I’m aware that people are slowly grouping up to one specific community per topic but I don’t think this means there isn’t an issue with communities being fractured. Using a third party tool to gauge which communities are popular also isn’t a great solution. Just searching Linux shows:
I don’t think each one of these communities has a different audience. It’s the same audience, but there isn’t an obvious answer for which one to visit or post in.
There are two good options: Host your own blog yourself, or join a blogging platform that isn’t corporate. I personally use BearBlog but I’ve heard good things about Write.as as well. These two have free blogging options and don’t sell your data. If you want to host it yourself (which is safer), check out Hugo.
Ultimately, bots scrape the entire internet and there’s no guarantee they will honor robots.txt of a particular website (which tells bots what they are and aren’t allowed to do). If it’s on the internet, people can scrape your content and there isn’t much you can do about it. That shouldn’t stop you from writing or blogging, just don’t post very personal data.
Also, feel free to join us on !blogging@programming.dev!