The Year Of The Blog
It's the year of the blog! Everyone's writing one! Everyone's setting up an RSS reader so they can make sure to catch when their friends have posted. It's the cool new thing! Sometimes they're called newsletters, but we know the truth - they're really blogs! Everyone's fleeing from the monopoly platforms, there's no longer a genuine case to be made that they're good, only that they're there. And when they find they still have a desire to put some thoughts online... it's a blog, baby!
Okay, maybe it's just me. And a subset of my friends.
But seriously, it's nice. Lower your standards. Unkink your writing, it's got all tangled up from fitting into that tiny box. You can put a pictures into them if you want, but you don't have to. There's no algorithm to beat, no best time of day or necessary face pic needed. You can refer to a thing you wrote in the past in the future!
I'm on a Discord server where every time we post a blog post it gets posted in the channel. That's nice. Often there's a nice chat! I bet there will be once I post this one. I want to set it up for other Discords I'm in. Not to post Official Updates on The Thing the Discord server is about... but just to let everyone see the blogs everyone else is writing. Get excited about it! Respond to each other at length!
A blog feels a little safe, a little cozy, but also free and clear. It's simultaneously public - you just need a link! But it's also hidden - it's not on the feeds, it's a click away. In today's internet we're either hiding away from the world in our little communities or we're hyper-optimising our public personas... but a blog is a secret third way to post!
Cohost got me started - you could write a post, and it felt appropriate at any length, and any level of thought. Two word shitpost or essay-length research report, people demonstrated they could appreciate either. It felt freeing after years optimising myself for Twitter! Cohost died, though, and to get that feeling again I had to spin up some infrastructure myself. It was annoying to do! I know people are trying to make it easier, and I wish them luck. But I succeeded, and I know you can too - join me here, writing posts of variable length and putting them online for people to read, join me in celebrating... The Year Of The Blog!
Some echoes to this post I wanna link here:
After all, if you're 30 or older and you're reading a blog, then you may have to consider the possibility that you don't actually have any coolness left to preserve. You might as well just join Bluesky and give up.
A bunch of us are here and we're posting. As if it's 2025... The fuckin' year of the blog!!
Maya
Thrilled to have Maya respond - I also know what she means in terms of being sceptical about the blog's status as a safer space... I definitely take the warning! But still there's a psychological element to it, this is my turf in a way... Anyway, good thoughts about salon culture and the conversations that can flow from blog posts...
And on that I should say that I have had a few people mention this idea of it being the year of the blog, talking about how they feel like they should start blogging... More meta posts to come, I think.
23 Mar: ah! like this one:
hey, just wanted to say your year of the blog post was super inspiring to me + i've been writing blog posts way more often since reading it!! thanks for the cool work!
— kaylee rowena 🫀 (@kayleerowena.com) 2025-03-23T13:17:08.865Z
and in fact going to look at her blog, i see this post:
or: not necessarily, quality, but effort, or polish, or high standards that mean i'm constantly thinking about making blog posts and rarely ever sitting down to write them, because to write them i'd need to open my code editors and mess with the layout and maybe i should do something interesting with the layout of the page instead of having it be a basic text-heavy page, maybe there's something i can do with the form of the website to make it unique and noteworthy ——
no! stop! bad! just write things!
i get bogged down in the process of things a lot, whether it's blog posts or comics or sewing projects or party planning. i always want to make something Different™ — as if the form of the thing is more notable than what i'm actually trying to say with it. i'm trying to convince myself that saying something badly is better than stressing about saying it interestingly and ending up never saying anything at all.
yes yes yes yes!!