You should start a blog
—Writing something down forces you to fully understand it. When an idea is on paper, you can see all of your assumptions and leaps in logic. It's common to start writing, do some research and find out that your original point was completely wrong.
This is a good thing.
You are now less wrong then before, and have something you can share so everyone else can also be less wrong.
Even if you don't learn anything new in the process, we don't find our interests and hobbies by magic: we read about them from someone else. Simply writing about what you did yesterday — even if you are not an expert on the topic — can be very valuable for the right person.
Why a blog:
Blogs have a long shelf-life: Social media posts vanish in hours, but a good blog post can stay relevant for decades. Your work can have a lasting impact on many people rather then being briefly noticed by a few.
Since posts are mutable and long lived, you don't have to aim for perfection. It's perfectly fine start with a single sentence and expand it over time: Websites are living documents that grow alongside your ideas.
Articles can build on each other, cite sources or include hundreds of pages worth of detail. None of these are requirements, but having the option allows nuanced discussions to take place.
You can write a detailed response to someone else's detailed opinion instead of just throwing insults: meaningful human interaction that just isn't possible on "social" media.
You can own your identity: If you register yourname.com (costs around around $10/year) you aren't tied to any particular service. Switching hosting provides is completely seamless: None of your readers will notice anything.
Compare that to being "
On your own website, you can customize everything, and there's no risk of a company forcing a terrible redesign on you.
Instead of being
Posts can be indexed by Google and friends: A niche post can become the top search result and keep that spot for years. Social media does have some indexing, but it is very hit-and-miss.
You can use RSS or mailing lists to keep readers updated without having to worry if the algorithmic feed is showing your work... and, of course, you can link to your site from social media.
The alternative...
On social media, if a post doesn't immediately go viral, it will be buried by the algorithm.
The only thing that people ever see are short and anger-inducing posts: They need to be short or readers will get distracted all the other content next to them. Posts also need to get "engagement", and anger is a great motivator.
Social media rewards posting short, misleading content with a broad appeal. Meaningful intellectual discussions are punished: some places have tiny character limits that prevent you from even trying.
Niche topics don't fare well: Unless it can find a large audience in the first few hours, it won't be shown to anyone else. Even if you are interested, you often won't be able to find it because the search feature doesn't work.
It's not an accident that these places are full of bad political takes and endless arguments. They make money from advertising: They want to keep the greatest number of people the site for as long as possible... even if they become horrible places to be.
Hosting:
This site is hosted on a VPS and written in HTML with a custom site generator to create the index pages. I'd only recommend this if you are planning to do other things on the server: Otherwise it's overkill and more expensive ($3.50/month) then other options.
If you are willing to write some HTML, Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages will host a site for free. If anything happens — because it's just slightly fancy text files — switching providers will be painless.
Update: I now have a companion page describing how write your own website in HTML. Taking a look is highly recommended unless you want to use a premade blogging tool with a generic theme.
There are also plenty of blog specific hosting services that let you get by without typing a single angle bracket. However, I haven't used any of them so I can't give specific recommendations.
If you bring your own domain, you don't have to stress about the choice: You can always switch to a different one without affecting your readers.
Closing notes:
Your first blog post will probably be bad. That's ok: Your second one will be better, and your third will be even better. All that matters is that you wrote something and put it out into the world.
You will get better with time.
While social media can be super toxic, most people on the internet are nice: The vast majority of what I receive is praise, "Thank You"-s and polite corrections. Out of hundreds of emails, I've only gotten a single piece of hate-mail.
... but please: Don't use an LLM to generate posts for you. I want to read what you have to say. Even if it's got a few spelling mistakes it's still yours and still has value. An LLM generated post is worthless: If I wanted to read AI slop, I would have generated it myself.
If you feel inclined to ChatGPT something, don't:
Post what you would have used as the prompt. That's the important part.