It’s Bloggin’ Time!

In November, Elon Musk fueled his Twitter addiction invested in free speech finally bought Twitter and it’s going great! If he keeps making Twitter a buggy, Nazi-filled hell hole, he would have done a great service to the internet. He’d chase away the minority yet influential of people who are terminally online and force them to make their own presence online, with a lot less hostility. It’s about time the creatives leave Twitter.

Brent describes the problems with relying on one site for creative work:

It Was Always a Bad Idea

The internet’s town square should never have been one specific website with its own specific rules and incentives. It should have been, and should be, the web itself.

Having one entity own and police that square could only deform the worldwide conversation, to disastrous ends, even with the smartest and most humane people at work.

Twitter’s new owner is certainly not one of those people. But it doesn’t matter: he unintentionally brought the change that needed to happen, the break in the consensus.

My RSS feed is a firehouse at the moment, but given that Twitter is going great¹, it has gotten many people to argue for a return to blogging as a way to reclaim the space Twitter took from us.

I got to writing this because of Monique Judge arguing to bring back personal blogging on The Verge, whose redesign has taken a more blog-like form.

Let’s get back to the community-building aspect of the internet

People built entire communities around their favorite blogs, and it was a good thing. You could find your people, build your tribe, and discuss the things your collective found important.

We are now in an age where people come on the internet to be the worst possible versions of themselves, and it’s an ugly sight to behold. Take the power back by building blogs and putting comment moderation in place (it’s relatively easy on both WordPress and Blogger).

Some, like Matthias and Andy Bell hope that this is the year of the personal website.

Interestingly, the best argument for blogging comes from a site called How to Market A Game. Despite it being a game marketing blog, the post has good reasons to blog:

1. They last forever
2. They have clout
3. They force you to research
4. You can interview people you like
5. You don’t do free work for a tech billionaire or in their words, don’t build your castle in other’s kingdoms.
6. Biggest of all, it’s yours!

You can even make money from blogging!

If you’re scared of blogging, there’s no need to be as Rachel found out. There aren’t as many Pepe watching as there would be on Twitter and the few who read your stuff might really enjoy it.

Though my site is like that, blogs don’t have to be walls of text. It can be a feed of stuff, be it images, audio or video on a domain you control as long as it results in a feed, as Chris suggests.

As for what to blog with, it doesn’t matter when starting out. WordPress.com, Blogger.com, LinkedIn Pulse, even Tumblr among others. Just make sure you don’t use a service that hates the internet. Better yet get a personal domain (preferrably through my affiliate link) so you have control over what your content falls under. Personally, I use the static site generator Hugo hosted on Cloudflare Pages but unless you’re a techie I don’t recommend it when starting out.

If you’re committed enough, you could even try a digital garden like what Tania is trying. I tried it some time ago but it was a lot of work, I hope to give it another shot in the future. Further yet, you might even go all in on the IndieWeb, but I haven’t looked into it much yet.

Conclusion

I had these links in my feed reader and I thought it was time to dump them out in a post on blogging. I hope I’ve convinced you to give blogging a shot this year!