In case of (blogging) emergency.....

The recent temporary disappearance of Yellowdog Granny's blog has again drawn my attention to the problem of what I could do if my own blog were ever taken down.  It's still not quite clear why her blog was removed, but apparently it involved a "dust up with a reader" whom she banned from commenting for being off-topic.  I doubt it's generally that easy to get a blog taken down, otherwise every blog on Blogger that discusses anything controversial would have disappeared long ago, and I'm sure the trolls who have been obsessively harassing me for over two years now have tried reporting me to Blogger already, and yet I'm still here.  Nevertheless, it's possible (though I think unlikely) that they will eventually get this blog removed by one method or another, so I need to be ready to set up a new blog on a new platform just in case.

I make frequent back-ups of the whole content of the blog; I'm not sure whether a back-up file could simply be uploaded to a new platform to recreate all 16½ years of this blog there, but at least I could copy-paste the most important posts into the new blog one at a time (a laborious process, but doable).  The problem would be choosing a platform.  There are many others besides the big three (Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr), and there are plenty of articles on the web which evaluate blogging platforms by various criteria, but none of them apply the all-important criterion of freedom from content-based censorship, which would obviously be my main concern in this scenario.

For a while I considered Substack, which I know does have a strong commitment to free expression, but it seems geared to celebrities and print authors interested in a paid-subscription model to make money, which is not what I'm trying to do here -- I want my blog to be open to anybody in the world who might find it of interest.  dBlog sounds good in many ways, but it's a very new platform and the association with cryptocurrency is a huge red flag.  Finding a platform dedicated to a particular political orientation probably wouldn't work either.  A right-wing platform would support my views on guns, transgenderism and (probably) Israel and Brexit, but would object to almost everything else I say.  A radical-feminist platform would object to my supporting sex-work legalization and opposing censorship of pornography (even though I don't actually like it).  Anyway, any thinking person's views evolve over time and I'm sure mine will continue to do so.  I'd need a platform that supported free expression across-the-board, on principle, regardless of content.

As it happens, among platforms I'm familiar with, it seems like Blogger itself is the one with the best policy in that area.  For example, when you go to a blog that posts highly-explicit sexual material, you see this:

.....and you proceed to the blog by clicking on the orange button.  It's the best of both worlds -- people who don't want to see explicit sexual material can easily avoid it, and those who want to post such material or view it can easily do so.  I haven't seen this used for blogs with political or other opinions which might upset somebody, but it seems like a good option if Blogger felt the need to pander to the professional offended people who have become such a blight on discourse of all kinds.  As it is, I've seen Blogger blogs with content seemingly much more "unacceptable" than mine, and they remain in existence.  But still, if a mainstream-left blog like Yellowdog Granny could be taken down at the instigation of a single asshole, I need to be prepared for the possibility.  13 years ago my blog was "locked" (not removed) for two days because some idiot algorithm flagged it as spam.  Shit happens.

If any readers know of a blogging platform totally committed to free expression for all viewpoints, left or right or whatever, regardless of which sacred cows get their panties in a twist about it, I'd be interested in knowing.  This will probably never happen -- but just in case.....