May 13, 2023

Hi there! It’s 2023. Facebook is a ghost town, Twitter is imploding, the Fediverse is awesome but maybe not quite what everyone wanted it to be. But there is a bright spot: all the cool kids are going back to blogging. Blogging! Like it’s 2002, baby!

I have to admit that I am still very nostalgic for 2002, when the web was still fairly young and wild and free and only partially monetized, before Google ads and social media and smartphones. When you had to hire someone to build your website (and maybe you’d hire me). When you knew people online mainly by what they’d written and shared rather than by photos of their feet on the beach or whatever. I can’t believe it’s been more than 20 years. I had… well… quite a few blogs back in the day, and three of them got some traffic sometimes. I made friends with other bloggers I’m still friends with today–on Twitter or Mastodon (or both).

I no longer have the urge to blog pseudonymously about work (blog #2) or homemaking (blog #3) or even old books (blog #1). I don’t really have much of an urge to blog at all, fwiw. But I do want to have a home on the internet again, even if it’s only a place to post interesting things I find and then share them on Mastodon.

So here we are, once again, at the end of what we used to call “the obligatory welcome post.” Welcome!