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!