Just remember that if you publish them to the web, you give up "first publication rights" that might prevent you from being able to publish them elsewhere later. The web does count as "publishing" regardless of whether you get paid.

If you don't care about that, just make a website and put them all on it. Maybe avoid a third party platform since you won't have complete ownership of your content. Any static site generator will work. I personally suggest Nikola but it doesn't matter. Anything that can generate a simple blog format should work.

You might also consider setting up a Mastodon account and pushing links to your stories there. I don't know how big the writing community is there but it's probably not nothing.

I wouldn't bother with a literary agent unless you're a professional looking to be signed by a major publisher and self-publishing platforms tend to be scams.

Problem is everything else is getting eaten by AI so I wouldn't even know how to market in this scenario.

The go-to site for finding markets for speculative fiction used to be ralan.com but it looks like it closed in 2023[0].

[0]Alternatives:

https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/

https://duotrope.com/

This is true. Personally I always try to get my work published with a third-party first, and then I talk with the editors to clarify policies. Most smaller magazines and publishers are pretty flexible, they’ll often have some provisions in place to allow you to re-publish original works on your own website after a certain period of time, if that’s the route you want to take.

It’s the approach I’ve used in the past with places like Paged Out and 2600 Hacker Quarterly.

I know the author of the Martian published that story first on his website, but I don’t really know the layout / or what “first publication rights” be or entail. I have to do my research - and yes, I never have used AI writing any of them so I’m kinda scrambling now to find a way to do this before it can. thank you