More indie hackers are relying on X, yet X is becoming more unreliable

While browsing X this afternoon, I got hit with the following message:

X was experiencing the second major outage in just 24 hours.

Why this happened is anyone's guess.

Many accounts on X speculated that the platform was being hit with massive cyberattacks. After all, Elon Musk himself had made the same claim a few weeks prior during a similar outage:

And this explanation is plausible. Musk has been making more enemies than friends with his policies at DOGE. And if people will vandalize his physical products — like Teslas — at scale, it stands to reason they'll also vandalize his digital products.

But to be honest, I'm not that concerned about Musk or politics. I'm concerned about indie hackers.

Platform risk

Increasingly over the years, indie hackers have migrated from their own blogs and newsletters to platforms like X. And for good reason:

The upsides of social media are numerous:

• It's easier to get more social media followers than to get more email subscribers.

• Social media posts can reach non-followers (through mechanisms like social sharing), whereas it's difficult for newsletter issues to reach non-subscribers

• It just "feels" easier to post on social media, whereas people tend to put a lot of pressure on themselves when publishing blogs and newsletters

And yet?

We don't own our social media accounts. So the more we invest in them without diversifying our online presence, the more platform risk we face.

Earlier this month, for instance, superstar indie hacker John Rush lost all 70,000 of his followers on LinkedIn:

I'm aware I'm not the first person — or even the thousandth — to advise indie hackers to invest in their own blogs and email newsletters.

But in this moment of political, technological, and cultural instability, it seems as good a time as any to issue a reminder: Own as much of your audience as you can, instead of loaning it. Especially if your livelihood depends on it.