Personal blogging
Hey there everyone,
I've been on here since near the start, and spend too much time finding content to post on here, but I just love this place. One thing I've noticed over the years is a severe lack of personal articles, blogs, or the similar and I think it's to do with the 'officialness' of a lot of the topics.
Would it be beneficial to just have a ~blogs section, to post links and thoughts on our personal writings? Even if that includes things like ~tech or ~cooking or whatever? Just to have a central place for our articles.
I don't mind posting my own in ~tech, but I can imagine the hesitation for everyone else as those areas feel more in-tune with "news" than personal thoughts. We have ~creative, but that feels more for artistic endeavors and projects.
Any ideas how we might be able to encourage more topics or links to personal (small-web) blogs (either your own, or someone else's) in the culture here? We seem to be becoming more and more a news aggregator, which is great because of the relevance and discussions (best on the web) but we have no real culture for small-web indie blogging.
We've always had a lightly supported self-promotion policy, but that it had a very short leash.
Officially:
I'd be very interested in a ~Blog, something that regularly features thoughts and musings and small discoveries from our resident members. There's a lot of diverse skills and talents and interests here.
I like reading personal blog posts, but I think its better if they are just posted in the topic category closest to the subject matter of the blog, be it ~life or ~misc or what have you. Tildes is organized by topic, so to me a ~blog would denote a place for discussing blogs rather than posting blogs about other topics. I personally don't mind if they are mixed in with other news articles, and if people don't like that, they can always filter them out assuming they are properly tagged.
+1 for keeping it topic based. Unless it's ~tech.indieweb or ~tech.smallweb and there are also discussions about that. But even then, I'd start with a recurring topic to test the the water as @winther suggested.
I love the concept. But moderation would be key, and this would be an uphill battle.
I love, when in the old times (the 2000s, I'm not that old :D), there were "planets", where people would have their own blog and they blogged about random interesting shit. Planets would aggregate these. How to cook something, how they did some sysadmin on their personal server, etc...
But now these spaces have been littered with people trying to build a personal online brand, SEO backlinkers, spammers, etc. It's really sad. And AI is most likely coming to these spaces as well.
I would love to see old-style planets again, with people just doing stuff for fun, not for fame or money. One of the people I look up to is this guy: https://lygte-info.dk/ the guy just test electric devices at home, for free, and share the results on his website, no ads, no javascript. I have no relation to him, I just look at his website with nostalgia...
You would have loved the webrings from the 90's. I found so much cool content back in the day by browsing randomly through webrings.
That's what came to mind when I read their post. Fan or hobbyist webrings were a fantastic source for web browsing that introduced you to all sorts of amazing creators.
omg https://lygte-info.dk serious website, thanks for that one.
please check out https://www.legetoejskataloger.dk/
I wonder how moderation would function with something like this. Are you thinking that there would be expectations for how topics/projects shared should be discussed? With a focus on curiosity and questions from a show and tell session as opposed to analysis and judgement of current events, perhaps? Nobody wants to enter the shredder... Haha
I was thinking of "common sense" which would be totally subjective. It would be a nightmare to enforce and make people think they're treated fairly.
Any ground rule would need exceptions:
Maybe people smarter would be able to come up with fair ground rules. :)
Maybe a recurring thread somewhere like ~misc where people can post new stuff from their blogs? I think many are reluctant to make top level posts to their own stuff, but the various recurring threads feels less self promotional to participate in.
That could work to start, I suppose. To test the waters.
We could expand it from standard 'small-web' things like personal blogs, but also to things like threads on other networks that might be of interest. Either things we write, or ones we find interesting that we feel warrant being posted (but not specifically as a thread).
The only problem is that this breaks our tagging and search systems, which I think are important, but it could be a good step? I still prefer ~blogs as an addition, but this isn't a bad idea.
I mean there already is a recurring thread on ~talk every week, "What did you do this week (and weekend)?", but it doesn't get very much traction.
I have seen that several times but I would prefer to write directly on my blog instead of Tildes.
Plus I run the risk of being accused of peddling my blog when no one asked.
I would guess that I am not alone in feeling this.
I think a regular post where people are encouraged to advertise their personal blogs is a good idea in principle. But of course as what the other comment threads are discussing, the devil lies in the details of what is ok to post and not.
I definitely would be interested in some small blogs. I have a curated news feed, and of course love all the discourse here. However, I do think a small blog topic could be super imformative and fun to read and comment on other users content.
Also, to keep the self promotion from getting out of hand, perhaps have some guidelines to frequency of posts.
As someone who has/had a blog, I don't miss it. The move away from big information monopolists like news sites, big name bloggers, big name vloggers (to some degree) who more-than-not consider themselves arbiters of everyone's information, I consider that a welcome paradigm shift. I believe diversity of information is important and that's also why I try not to get into debates about which information sites are best. Blogs also tend to be too wordy, guilty myself, when the same can be stated in much less words. Brevity is to appreciate people's time, sorry to go off course but just a little pet peeve of mine about the many blogs I've encountered.
I am on the other side; I detest the brevity and shortness that has consumed all types of communications lately. I adore writing in all its forms, sure sometimes they become too wordy, but humans in general when they are talking passionately about things that interest them in person will talk and ramble their way on. I say let them do so in text, a formalized method with editing to connect the dots that their mind explores (Edit: like this comment! It's an edit! You can't do that in real life well! I mistyped 'talking' for 'writing' and that didn't make sense in this context, but now it does!)
Brevity is great for abstract distillations, but longform writing (even in microblog/tumblog formats!) showcase personality that the abstract drops. For the writer of text - longer form writing is beneficial in expanding your thoughts and ideas and decision, creating a line of unconnected dots and allowing sentence structure to be the railway for the train of thoughts as it travels from snowy lands to the swamps of the land, the sentence railway guides and connects them although they are unlike one another. For the reader of text - it creates something they can become attached to, something they remember as they spent time consuming it. They are the passengers on the train, and they are excited to be visiting different lands and ideas, but there might be a section that is a bit boring and tedious or too familiar, so they nap! They sleep to pass the time and skip to the more interesting parts of the journey.
There are very few times, if any, where the power of "I wish this was shorter" was more powerful in my mind than the articles that I have read and go "I wish this was longer! I need more!" only to let it leave my mind because there wasn't more included. Details are important, you can't get that in brevity. How many short posts does one consume in a day, what is the percentage you can rattle off and remember in their entirety, if at all - but how many longer forms of writing do you remember, ponder, and think about as it had time to gestate and sit in that hungry organ of the mind and brain.
I don't care about appreciating people's time with writing, if they want to speedread it go ahead, if they want to stop reading it halfway through - great! If they want to nap and skip the better parts, great! I'm sure many people saw this wall of text and went "yeaaaaah, no." and passed on it. And that's fine. Let them, that's the beauty of long-form test, you do not have to read it all to understand the parts that interest you.
Since we're a technology-focused place I'll use this as an example: I would prefer documentation that was overly verbose on each function and charsets and arguments and include the entire history of the decision making, than any documentation that just says that a feature is there and it has two options. Even if it solves my question for reading it, I would always prefer the documentation with more information to flip and scroll through.
I feel like we're already inundated with so much useless information, I don't miss long blog posts, even if I'm guilty of defaulting to longer-form writing, myself, at least compared to friends and family. I don't feel my writing deserves more time than anyone else's so I try to keep it on the shorter end, especially in less formal company. If you're arguing from a pro-intellectual stance, you could also argue smarter people can easily fill in the blanks and get information that's hinted at in shorter form writing while more verbose writing caters to those who can't abstract well enough from source material.
As someone who also tends towards word-vomit, I completely agree. The best writing I've seen is usually concise and clear - not necessarily short, but no longer than it needs to be. Even in long-form essays that are meant to be decadent reads, you still need careful, tight editing to prevent the whole thing collapsing in on itself like a black hole of navel-gazing.
With technical writing I think more important than brevity or verbosity is structure - give the most important details up front, give context and examples after that, and make it easy for the reader to find their way around. Again, though, this mostly comes down to editing after the text has been written.
I find the source more important than the brevity. Many "big name" blogs and sites and sources overfill their posts (and/or organize them poorly) because of the focus on advertising and so forth.
When some intelligent person is making a blog post of their own, on their personal site, and the quality is there- sometimes I prefer it when it's extensive. Like blog posts about tech history, or how something works, or something neat they've discovered, or their own pondering about things.
The quantity matters little to me if the quality is good. I get more out of a long blog post by someone on the small web than I do twenty articles of any length from some big sites.
I feel like the modern Internet is still more-or-less the same thing, except instead of big-name bloggers it's big-name Twitter users (Tweeters? Xers?) and TikTokers.
Long-form ones have moved to YouTube. Still largely one-way communication and prone to information-free rambling as incentivized by Google's insistence on stickiness as a metric. There's plenty of similarities with recipe blogs padded with life stories and a 30+ minute essay about something like say, video games.
Upside of blogs at least is I can scroll down, click a button or use extensions to modify sites to get to the content. Videos get maybe Sponsorblock and if I'm lucky, the creator put in chapter titles so I can scrub through to the point.
I feel like it's better, in that regard. But to some extent, you can't solve societal issues with technology. There's still going to be hierarchies but purity of information, meaning less filtered through a privileged few, I think has gotten better. Of course that also means no more blaming "mainstream media" so much anymore, since it is less effective than it once was, and time to take responsibility for what we ourselves project onto each other.
Does anyone have recommendations for hosting a small blog? I currently run one for a community non-profit on nearlyfreespeech but it doesn’t play very well with Wordpress.
Open to other low budget hosts or a CMS other than Wordpress.
Hugo is wonderful! You can host through github pages but then you have to either pay for github or have the repo public. I want private drafts so my blog is hosted on a DO droplet that costs less than premium github would
Awesome thanks for the ideas! I actually toyed around with using Jekyll and GitHub Pages but like you I didn’t want to pay for GitHub Premium.
I actually work for a DO competitor so maybe I’ll put something together for our upcoming hack week.
I actually prefer that Tildes doesn't host any content other than text, it keeps it small and encourages more written than image based discussion (which always devolves).
My post wasn't to use tildes as a blogging platform (something I have considered for myself multiple times), but for a community group that is purely for posting our own small-web articles on our own sites, or ones we find floating in the wind on this superhighway of ours. That way we can cultivate a better culture to share those sorts of things than just hard news links.
A number of years ago, @Deimos actually mentioned considering making a ~blog group for exactly that purpose: