Blogging and sharing
The chances that anyone would read your words in this day and age of limited attention spans are increasingly dismal. Within that context, starting a new blog (or newsletter) is not the smartest thing. Furthermore, the written content has to fight with audio (podcasts) and video for attention. Not an easy life if you are starting afresh. Additionally, personally, there is a certain degree of platform fatigue - I dont want my content to be somewhere on some server - never to be recovered. I don’t even remember the material that I posted on Blogger or WordPress when I started blogging as a teenager. But by not engaging with modern written content platforms like Substack one also risks not engaging with the people.
With this iteration of public writing, I am trying to do two things:
- Keep things in my control as much as possible
- Connect with social networks on my own terms
Keeping things under my control
To that end, this blog is built with Jekyll (one of the oldest, if not the oldest, blog-aware static website generators). Hosted using GitHub Pages. Content remains on my computer and on GitHub. GitHub can certainly go “evil,” but I will still have my content without any particular need to run any export operation.
Connecting on my own terms
This one is super tricky. I stay on X mainly for the entertainment value and to get a daily dose of depression. And, I guess maintaining my LinkedIn is part of some unsaid professional pact. But AI slop and fakery on both platforms make things difficult. And then again, posting solely on any particular platform risks losing control.
So I am trying to connect this blog with Bluesky. Idea here is simple - I write here, and my posts get pushed to Bluesky. And to that end, I am using Bridgyfed.
Goals - Fingers Crossed
Things remain simple - that’s the ultimate goal.