Vingle is a neat platform for short-form writing, long-form writing, answering questions, and sharing images. Perhaps you're seeking to branch out into some alternatives to Vingle. Here are 8 excellent options. It's important to point out that the best fit for you will depend on what you've been using Vingle for. Vingle is a lot more flexible in its usage than any of its alternatives are. For the purposes of this article, I'll assume you want to do medium-length or long-form writing in order to promote your site, yourself, or your ideas.
Best free alternatives to Vingle
Medium
If you're looking for a good writing platform with a built-in audience, then Medium is a great choice for you. Medium allows anyone to write. Be aware that the culture there is more heavily tilted towards those who wish to share their knowledge, a viewpoint, or a personal learning experience - workplace, career and professional topics are popular. This is not a diary or poetry site, although there's nothing actually stopping you using it for that purpose. It can take time to build up an audience on Medium, even if you're writing solidly in their popular niches.
You should know that Medium has gone through many changes over the years in how it works, and the rules could change yet again. Therefore it's best used as an additional writing platform than your primary one, unless you're happy to jump through whatever hoops occur with any future changes.
Diaspora
Diaspora is a decentralized (but not blockchain or Web 3) social network which allows both short and long-form writing. It's open source and privacy-oriented. It supports hashtags, friend circles, and much more. If you've been disappointed by Vingle's low interactivity, you may prefer Diaspora. It's more of a social network than a writing platform though, so once something disappears down the feed people might not get the chance to see it again easily.
Because of the timeline where things disappear down the feed, Diaspora is a better place to share links to your writing than to actually write your ideas.
Popular topics in Diaspora are tech, privacy, Linux, photography, art and more. People tend to be open and inclusive, but they're not so likely to interact with anything they may see as commercial or self-promotional.
Substack
If you have an idea, product or site to promote, why not just promote it directly to an audience and cut out the blog, the Mailchimp list, and so on? That's where Substack comes in. It's subscription publishing - you just write a newsletter that comes out at regular intervals (you pick the interval, whether it's daily, weekly, or monthly), and Substack makes sure it gets to your audience. You're able to import any existing audience you may have, for example on your own Mailchimp or other email subscriber list.
Substack is better than just a mailing list though, because they make it easy for you to grow your audience. On the Substack site, potential subscribers can search the site for topics they like and then can choose to subscribe to your newsletter. All kinds of content can be found here.
You can decide whether your newsletter is to be free or to require a subscription, which you get a cut of. Potential subscribers get the option to read a previous issue of your newsletter first for free, to check it out and see if they'll like it before committing.
All of these features would be difficult to implement yourself, but with Substack it's all built into the platform for you. Every tool you need is already there waiting for you. Just write your newsletter according to your schedule and you're all set!
LiveJournal
LiveJournal is an interactive blogging site, where each person has their own LiveJournal blog on the platform, and people can comment on each other's. There's also the option for polls and so on. Virtually every topic imaginable is represented here, and it's up to you whether you want to do a personal journal style of blogging or write something more formal such as how-to articles.
This may be the closest option in spirit to Vingle, although I've found that it's a bit harder to discover relevant content in LiveJournal than in Vingle. Therefore you may find LiveJournal more of a challenge in terms of getting views for what you've written.
Hubpages
If your writing style gravitates to helpful how-to articles, Hubpages is a fantastic alternative to Vingle. Anyone can join Hubpages, and you have the advantage of having a built-in community of other writers to read your articles.
Furthermore, Hubpages is part of a network of topic-specific niche sites where people write about their expertise, hobbies, or interests. This is also a huge help to you because if you have an article in one of the niche sites, people browsing that site are likely to be already interested in your topic. By contrast, this is not likely to happen with someone browsing a general-topic platform such as LiveJournal. So you're able to leverage the existing audience of the Hubpages niche sites as opposed to starting your own topic-specific blog(s).
Tempaste
As its name suggests, Tempaste is a place where you set an expiry time on your writing. You can pick up to a year, so your article gets to hang around awhile before it goes away. There are plenty of text editing and design options. You can write anonymously or create an account to manage what you've written, it's your choice.
While your pastes are public there, it's not designed to be interactive, so you probably won't get anybody reading what you've written unless you share the link for your paste somewhere.
Tumblr
Tumblr is designed for both short-form and long-form writing and it's interactive. In addition to that, people tend to interact well with other people's content, so it's one of the best alternatives to Vingle.
In years past, Tumblr wasn't so good at keeping away unwanted explicit content from users. Back then, it was more of an "adult platform", or at least better suited for people that were OK being exposed to that type of content (even if they weren't in that niche themselves). It wasn't the best choice for family-friendly topics, and at that time I quit Tumblr for exactly that reason. The good news is that right now, while it's not a good choice for those under the age of 18, the platform has become quite a lot cleaner. If you don't want to see "adult content", you probably won't be exposed to it. So it's worth trying it out.
Gistshare
Seeking to occupy the middle ground between short-lived social media posts and long-form articles, Gistshare is perfect when you want to distill information down to its main points. You can share how-to information, notes you've made that could be useful to others, and more. People can bookmark other people's articles there, and it's relatively easy to discover topics that may interest you.
Bonus alternatives to Vingle
While not in the original 8 alternatives listed above, these next options may also be of interest depending on how you're using Vingle and what you're seeking to accomplish.
Plurk
Plurk is a Twitter-like social network. It's designed for short-form updates only, but has a longer character count than that of Twitter. If you've been using Vingle to share links to other articles you've written, Plurk will be perfect for that. Be aware it's not very interative though. If you're considering Plurk, you should check out the guide I wrote about using Plurk for businesses and brands.
Dreamwidth
Dreamwidth is a blogging site that's very similar to LiveJournal. It's designed for any type of writing, whether it be long-form, short-form, articles, diary, memoir, images. All of the same advantages and disadvantages that apply to LiveJournal also apply to Dreamwidth. It can therefore be challenging to get people reading your writing there, since it's not always easy to discover content in related topics.
Write.as
Unlike all of the other options in this article which are free (or have a free plan tier), Write.as is a paid service. That said, Write.as is a great platform to write and to publish your writing. It has a beautiful distraction-free editor that lets you get on with the business of writing. With your account you can create more than one blog there, which is helpful if you write on several different topics and you want to keep them distinct.
Conclusion
There are plenty of great alternatives to Vingle for your writing. The best option for you will depend on how you're currently using Vingle, but you're certain to find something that works well for you here.
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