Starting a blog? In THIS economy?

Starting a blog in 2024 seems a little silly. In fact, when I idly brought up my desire to do so with a small group of friends, "that seems a little silly" was the very first reaction I got. And maybe it is, I don't know.

But it's not just "starting a blog". For me, it's a little more. It's a part of a return, in my own small way, to to the unfulfilled promise of the World Wide Web. I've been involved in computer-related technical fields of various types for over 25 years. I watched the Internet grow up and the Web go from "this cool decentralized hypertext thing" to an over-complicated platform for delivering malware applications to users on everything from fridges to phones.

And you know, it's great in a lot of ways. Watching my kids have instant, easy access to a wealth of tools and information I had to fight for, with nothing more than a fairly cheap pocket computer running a web browser, is pretty amazing!

It has also kind of gotten weird. Corporate greed coupled with designers and developers who care more about "pushing the envelope" than making good things on the web has created a kind of horrifying morass of centralized corporate "web properties". Walled gardens that aim to corral users into adding some kind of monetary value, usually by serving up their eyeballs—not to mention their privacy—to advertisers. Gotta keep those money-making eyeballs on the site. Even if it means breaking the fundamental ideas underlying the Web.

The cost of that greed-and-hubris driven battle for attention has been the death of some really great things. Webrings. RSS/Atom syndication. Neat little niche sites. Even proper podcasts (RSS+audio files on a web host) are slowly fading into exclusive "web shows" fragmented across private platforms. I don't think it's a good trade. And blogs and blogging culture are a casualty in a way too. Fewer and fewer people have real blogs. Many of those that do are using some corporate-lock-in fiasco to blog with, which will inevitably enshittify or die.

I'm not enough of an idealist to imagine that I'm making any kind of a Significant Difference by rebelling against these trends. I'm still doing it, in a myriad small ways. I run a proper home server rather than put everything on the cloud. I self-host wherever I reasonably can. I pick software that respects its users—in terms of user-experience choices, resource usage, and a myriad other things. I try to use systems that honor the distributed and decentralized spirit of the early Internet (e-mail, Matrix for chat, Mastodon/ActivityPub based social media, etc.).

Going back to keeping a blog is part of that. This is not some hipster idealism: it's not like I'm not on BlueSky and YouTube and all that, too. It's just a desire to do cool things in ways that respect people and don't feed the centralization of the world's coolest network. I know it's going to be fun for me. And I hope it'll be at least a little interesting, and at least a little valuable, for you.

The header photo "Dumpster Fire" by peretzp is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .