An Independent Web
Every time Twitter has a wobble I go down a deep hole of trying to make a space for myself on the internet. It’s pretty cyberpunk to go back to the roots of the internet; servers at home hosting your corner of the internet, accessible only via your friends’ sites or, god forbid, Google doing its job.
After lots and lots of research, here’s where I’ve landed. Blot.im (this website) is my personal blog and landing page. All of my long-form thoughts live here (though I definitely do not write as much as I’d like to). Peregrine Coast Press pays for a Mastodon instance and that’s where all of my shit-posting and microblogging lives. The obvious advantages are that I own all of this. I can cross-post everything to any new platform which pops up safe in the knowledge that some overzealous Ts&Cs won’t actually claim my work as their own.
I flitted between a few blogging sites in the past few months. Micro.blog is a really great idea, but I found the UX and Dealing With Hugo a bit too much for me - I didn’t like the way the blog looked, and I want writing to be frictionless. I don’t want to be learning CSS and HTML just to make something I’m happy with. Obsidian Publish was a strong contender - I love the idea of the digital garden, though I can’t actually envisage my use for it. Everyone who’s into Digital Gardens might as well be speaking gobbledegook because like… what the fuck is a Map of Content? Why is me writing a blog post on the internet suddenly about synergising thoughts and amplifying my interconnected ideas?
(I would actually like to go back to it at some point but I don’t read enough or take enough notes for that specific usecase to be relevant to me. My day-to-day is a fucking mess of apps and I’m slowly finding myself leaning more and more towards pen-and-paper.)
I don’t want to pontificate too much about the benefits of doing things this way lest it sounds like a “Just install Linux!” argument, but I hope that the rapid downfall of several platforms at once has folks reconsidering what their presence on the internet actually is.
I’d love to set up WebMentions and comments and content syndication, but I think the reality is that nobody really gives a fuck right now and it’s quite beyond my abilities to set up. The majority of my interactions with folks are on Discord right now, and blog-to-blog replies are pretty old school. One step at a time!