When I built this site, to a large extent I wanted it to be a reaction to what I consider to be the failings of the modern web. That includes common themes that I’ve already ranted about in other places on the site (de-corporatization being largely among them), but I also have been thinking a lot about how we’ve…broken what the web was meant to be. At its heart, the world wide web was intended to be a document sharing resource. But what kind of documents? What kind of baggage came along with those documents?
I wanted a place where I could practice writing long form content without having to worry about that long form content sitting on some corporate server. A blog, though I’ve always kind of despised the term, even when they were fashionable. There are a decent number of sites where you can still actually create a fairly functional blog. Substack and Medium spring to mind. Ghost has been picked up by those who are slightly more technically inclined. Sadly, 90% of the people who should be using those sites are making YouTube videos instead, but I digress.
What I definitely didn’t want, though, were comments or feedback loops. I wanted to start writing because I feel like writing is a skill that I used to be pretty good at, but like all unused skills, one which has atrophied over the years. Engagement is probably the worst cancer on the modern web. It’s the most insidious cancer to modern thought.
I also wanted a place where I could easily stick a picture and copy a link to show someone in discord, IRC, or email. Basically, Imgur without the ads and with, again, that sense of ownership. Instagram without the feedback loop and the sociopathic owner. There are stand-alone self hosting solutions. I tried one that was tied into the Fediverse. I can’t remember what it was called, though I do remember that, like almost everything associated with the Fediverse, it kind of sucked.
I really did not want a microblog, mostly because of the connotation of what twitter and its descendants have morphed into. What used to be a ‘this is what I’m up to’ sort of short and sweet content type has turned into something it was never meant to be. Here’s some long form content shoved into a dozen short form content boxes. Here’s a picture of a bunch of words that should have been a blog post to begin with.
Seriously, if you have something to say and you can’t do it in 140 characters, you probably should be posting it somewhere else. Bluesky? Mastodon? They’re desperate to recreate twitter without realizing that the only thing worse than Elon Musk is twitter as a fucking medium. Wait, the only thing worse than Twitter as a fucking medium is some half-assed copy of twitter.
And these are just my complaints before you take into account the algorithm and the idiotic dopamine feedback loop everyone allows themselves to be driven into. People were right to ditch twitter in the aftermath of its acquisition by a fucking idiot. The only mistake they made was instead of walking away clean, they jumped right back into the same shitty medium. There is value in short form content, though. There are plenty of subjects that merit a two or three sentence reflection, but not a full article or essay. Doogie Howser figured this shit out back in the 90s. Rather than add to the shitty twitter clones, I just created a short and sweet two-three sentence content type where I could be free to wax philosophically (but tersely) about whatever I want. Bonus points for including “I’m 14 and this is deep” energy.
So those are our three main forms of public ‘content’. I’m hopeful that they can be used in such a way that the content types themselves lend, rather than distract, from the intended messages they’re used for. I’m adding some others.
Lists, which I’ve already added, can be made public, but I basically built them as an on-line tool to help me organize building this thing (and eventually, other things). I’m considering adding ‘notes’ and ‘outlines’ to help facilitate the writing process by having private content that can be used to organize thoughts which can be folded into public content. Again, the idea is to create these content types that serve the data they’re meant to hold.