Twitter is dead. Mastodon, Threads, & whatever the hell the Fediverse is are scrambling to fill the void. Reddit is having a civil war. Everywhere I look, people are watching 7 second vertical videos of funny chickens. Something is very wrong with the state of social media.
Perhaps I'm just getting old, but the trend seems to be towards consumption, rather than creation. Certainly not conversation. The likes of Snapchat, TikTok, & Instagram seem designed to facilitate no more than a heart emoji as your response to a post. Even with the stunted format of microblogging aside, just holding an active account on Mastodon or X (Twitter) is now a political statement. The one platform that may in fact be formatted to produce meaningful content is Facebook, but sadly that has been taken over by your most extremist & elderly of relatives.
Enter the return of the blog.
Alright, sure, fine, blogs never actually left. In fact, they're stronger than ever. Half of the internet is running on WordPress. But the average user isn't posting to their personal blog like they might've been in the early 2000's. There was a creativity at the core of your online presence that we seem to have unwittingly traded for ...what exactly? The meme economy? Surely we can do better.
A fair bit of this can be chalked up to '90's kid nostalgia, sure. But I want to hold a space for myself that isn't so disposable, or forgettable, or transactional as the current affair. A long form blog gives the power to start the conversation. It invites new creations to be shared. New ideas to come forward from each of us.
But... why Blogger?
The answer isn't actually all that complicated for me. Blogger, while dated & rudimentary in many respects, provides a simple framework to share long format posts on my own domain. & the essential feature that trumps WordPress? Blogger is hosted for FREE. I just needed to dust off some old CSS tricks to get things just so. I can even link into Google Analytics & AdSense, if I want to. & I, for one, find the dated interface to either be dismissible or charming.
Medium & Substack start to fall back into the traps of the new social media paradigm that I'm trying to avoid here. You can easily start to worry more about followers than posts, or to prioritize monetization over creation for creation's own sake. They pit you as a product looking for an audience to market your written wares. That's not it. What I'm looking for is just a place to call my own.
To give you an idea of how stripped back from the standard social media exchange I wanted to go here, I'll say, my original plan was merely sharing on my site manually via links to posts published on telegra.ph, the bare bones instant publisher from the makers of the messaging app Telegram. I decided I needed at least a skosh more structure.
I think we could all use a blog to call our own.
Join me in returning to a better web, won't you?
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