(I wrote this to convince some of my IRL friends who “follow” my substack account to come join us here on the free web. For those of you reading on Micro.blog this is of course the very definition of preaching to the choir.)
Before I begin, ask yourself a question: are you happier with the things you do on the internet now than you were 10 years ago? How about 20 years ago? What was your internet life like in 2006? Would you take that over the current situation if you could?
One of the best things I’ve read so far this year was a piece by Joan Westenberg called The Case for Blogging in the Ruins. The ruins, of course, are the internet. Or more specifically, the siloed reactive waste sites we have been taught to call social media. The places of the internet that for many people are the internet and for younger people are the only web they have ever known. Despite its very good qualities, substack is starting to look and act more like these other areas. (Alan Jacobs was right, as usual, substack won’t save us.)
In Joan’s piece she argues that one of the most radical actions one can undertake in the current version of the web is blogging. To write things and post them to a website you own, and see what happens. Often nothing will. Sometimes a few people will read and one or two will respond thoughtfully. Sometimes a discussion begins in the comments, and when things get really exciting someone will write a counterpost on their blog.
This describes is the first version of the web I encountered and grew up using. Exchanges of information and ideas, along with recording and recounting the everyday of our lives. The blogosphere.
In the early blogging days no one could conceive of a following of millions. The savvy among us installed hit counters at the bottom of their blogs and made special posts when 1000 people had visited the blog in all of history. Blogs considered wildly popular would have hits in the tens of thousands. It was a project of human scale, mostly among friends with a few likeminded strangers joining in. (A writing tick many of us used was something like, “to the three people reading this.”)
Back in October I set out to finally fix some issues I’d been having with my Wordpress website and decided it was time to scrap it and start again. This led me to host my site on micro.blog, which also has a limited social feature that is a lot like twitter was pre-algorithm (a certain world’s-wealthiest-man gets a lot of heat for the state of twitter, but forget not that it was a garbage heap long before he supercharged the worst aspects of it). A chronological timeline, posts only from those you choose to follow. NO ADS. There are no advertisements. You don’t see anything in your feed that is advertising products, services, or paid subscriptions.
And everyone there is a blogger to some extent because the thing that holds the network together is the individual URLs of each person. We all have our own little piece of internet to create and maintain, and you can say hey to your neighbors and chat back and forth about the things you’re making. It’s like a front porch, a quadrangle, a book club. It is an open network (the term of art is Federated) so you can follow people on any other open network or even any RSS enabled blog.
The other thing is, no one is making or trying to make money at it. The substack feature that has caused all of its problems is that at its heart it is an engine for monetization. And for many people, that is great. Lots of people have scraped together enough followers to make a little side cash or even a living. Ted Gioia can buy a private island with his newsletter lucre. I am genuinely happy that more people can make an independent living writing. But wherever gold is found, prospectors follow, bringing their saloons and whorehouses with them.
There is no gold in the blogosphere. Nobody is there grifting.
One of the most amazing things about blogging again is that it has encouraged me to think in different ways. PJ Vogt’s *Search Engine* podcast did an episode about The Fediverse recently. In it PJ says, “Twitter makes you think like a bumper sticker, Instagram makes you think everyone is hot and on vacation.” The tool shapes the man.
How does a blog make you think? At least in paragraphs. And occasionally making connections between different things, or noticing things. And then having a place to think about that in writing a bit. Maybe someone else will resonate. Maybe they won’t, but you will have spent time doing something worthwhile.