Migrating Birds

Posted on July 17, 2024

I wrote my first ‘blog’ post thirty years ago, before anyone called them blog posts or weblogs. In fact, it wasn’t even on the web – it was a post on a BBS that I was able to access at my friend’s house. We didn’t have a modem. What I did have, however, was a strong desire to make friends – and the idea of making them in eight-bits was more appealing than the two-bit town I lived in.

This graph shows the number of ‘blog’ posts (specifically not including microblogging sites like Twitter and social media wall posts from things like Facebook) over the past three decades.

The First Social Network

The first mountain-like hump is my LiveJournal years. Before LiveJournal I had a tiny GeoCities homepage – but I ditched that and went all in on LJ once I realised how powerful its community features were. On LiveJournal I chronicled much of my journey through secondary school, sixth form, and university, since I joined in 1999.

The second hump is when blogging became part of my job. I stopped using LiveJournal and managed a WordPress website on which I maintained a tech blog, which was strongly encouraged and incentivised by many of my employers. Yes, I got a bonus if I blogged enough.

It all went downhill from 2008. I wonder why?

The Twitter Years

I was one of the first few thousand people to sign up to Twitter. I knew someone who worked there, and got relatively early access. I was addicted almost instantly. Friends of mine built add-ons to Twitter like the retweet button, twitpic, and tweetdeck which eventually became part of the platform by aquisition, and I was on the bleeding edge testing them all.

I wrote millions of words. Far more than if I’d been writing blog posts. But these words were contained into 140-character bubbles of wit, complaint, query, and descriptions of breakfast. I amassed – before I changed my name and transitioned – two-hundred thousand followers. I was enthralled. And it stopped me blogging. I lost the ability to write longer-form anything let alone just blog posts. Life became segmented into tiny little chunks that were easy to digest.

But the smaller the bites you take, the less you really need to chew things over. I was unhappy, and the way I’d taken to expressing thoughts and consuming media was part of that.

Thankfully, there was transphobia

The second I started living more truthfully to my changing gender identity, the wheels fell off. Conference talk invitations dried up, and my Twitter account became a warzone. After a particuarly troublesome converation with my employer at the time about their dislike of my having brought up a controversial issue, I deleted my account. I didn’t leave Twitter completely until 2022, but by 2016 I was no longer behind the wheel of a big-number account.

I dedicated more and more time to getting back to longer-form writing, and am proud to have published books and articles and academic papers that I definitely didn’t have the focus to do in the height of my twitdiction. But, as you can see from the graph, I never really got back into blogging again. That well still felt poisoned by years of corporate abuse and directionless clickbait.

Along came you

I’d been a big critic of how commercial (and, frankly, unusable) the web had become for quite some time – but really found a home and a wonderful community of likeminded folk over on The Fediverse. I joined Mastodon back in 2018 but didn’t really use it much, and it wasn’t until I tried out a few instances (namely the wonderful scholar.social and digipres.club) until I settled into hackers.town and started to realise that I could still have social media, just minus the limits and the algorythms and the addiction mechanisms that commercial platforms relied upon. The fediverse introduced me to so many wonderful people and – crucially – so many wonderful ideas.

The idea of making the web small again. Protocols like Gemini. The tildeverse, a community garden for the internet.

I was in love again. I set up over at tilde.green to explore this new world and built a website from scratch using very 90s formatting. I didn’t use any CSS, either. It was ugly, but it was mine. But there were things I missed.

Terence Eden talks a lot about WordPress, a platform I’ve had a lot of love for over the years. I’d shyed away from returning to it because it feels so corporate-and-business focussed now. But – I thought – what if I hosted a minimal version and wrote a completely custom theme? No JavaScript, no bloat, just a super simple website that I could still use a CMS for and do things like connect to ActivityPub etc.

Getting To The Actual Point After 792 Words of Preamble

So, I made a plan. I was recently laid up recovering from pneumonia and I started to think about what my theme might contain, where I’d host it, and how I could be as minimal as possible. I decided on a totally new domain name which, thanks to the Albanian government, is the coolest domain hack I’ve found for my name. And all of that led us here – with content migrated and things in a relatively stable shape, I’m making my first new post on my new home on the web, explaining why I decided to make a new home on the web and, particuarly, why I’m writing about deciding to make a new home on the web.

This site is likely to always be a work in progress. There’s lots of interesting stuff I want to do around RSS and ActivityPub, I’d love to work on the theme a little more, and I’m going to keep stripping bits out of WordPress to make it as lean as I can whilst keeping it functional. I need to think carefully about how to maintain this content on Gemini, too, as I’m really committed to seeing where that platform goes.

I also want to do some necroposting. I’ve got thirty years of blog content archived in various files and folders and places, and I’d love to take a leaf out of Terence’s book and republish some of my older content. For posterity? Maybe. For hilarity? Definitely.

I promise not all of my posts will be this long. But I can promise that I’ll make them. Finally, it feels it’s time to blog again.