(Not a) Blog Philosophy

Above all, I don’t want to be doing this.

OK, not really. But what I actually am is indecisive (in all things!), and I have competing urges, like:

• Wanting to share the few bits of actual knowledge and experience that, like a salt-craving mountain goat, I’ve licked off the world
• Genuine deference to people that are smarter and more well-spoken than me

and:

• An allergy to the self-branding of unimpressive technocrats like myself as raconteurs with “hot takes”
• Dear lord, someone is wrong on the internet

and:

• I really, really don’t want to manage web publishing myself
• Being filled with rage by the tools that are supposed to make this easy

This site is the latest in a long tradition of these priorities flip-flopping and turning into something new. I don’t intend to say much, because I don’t have much to say.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Kyle for stealing much of his approach after a chance conversation on Mastodon. I like the idea of having a space on the internet whose goal is to conciously remove expectations and barriers of self-confidence in order to be more authentic, even mindful. We’ll see if it sticks.

The Twitter Era

Important stuff happened to me on Twitter. I found myself. I landed a job. I came out. I found the deepest, truest love I’ve ever had. So it’s not like I can forget it. I can’t defend it, either.

I was an early adopter, but I was a teenager at the time so it actually became horribly embedded into my psyche for over a decade. A number of people are recognizing the negative impact this has had on them (circa 2023). But I was there already. It killed my mood all the time, and made me worse at communicating thoughtfully. There’s dozens more reasons — many on a global scale — but those should be enough for wanting something out of your life.

Finding a Home

If you’re someone with a little technical ability, it’s en vogue to hyperobsess over your blog as one of a million eternally-unfinished side projects. (I’m not bitter.) I chafe at this for a couple of reasons, the biggest one being the way it leads me down an infinite road of bikeshedding.

I just want to have something nice, to free myself up to do the things I actually like to do, that matches my values, and that I can throw money at to solve the hard problems. In practice, ticking all those boxes is an exercise in frustration.

• The popular website-in-a-box-tools are largely expressive enough, but their pricing economies suck. I am lucky enough to afford it, but throwing that money in the toilet month after month creates an unhealthy association between guilt and writing/sharing/self-promotion.

• I’m aware and excited of the growing tooling on the fediverse, I simply don’t want to be a sysadmin. If I can sign in to a thing and update Debian packages, I will do it compulsively.

• Micro.blog did such a good job of abstraction, but that community showed its ass being really petty and insular. Like deciding to take middling native apps and make them worse hybrid apps as a way to “get back” at app stores. I don’t actually care that much about the perceived evil of walled gardens, and it simply doesn’t make sense to pay into a walled garden I don’t like the smell of.

• I’m keeping an eye on weblog.lol just because it’s so damn cute.

For now, my home is spread between here (for more permanent things) and Mastodon (for more ephemeral things).