First Blog Post
Hello world! This is the first blog post we're posting that actually started out as a blog post! You may have noticed that there are a couple posts dated previously to this one, and the reasoning for that is because we made those originally as miscellaneous site articles. They used to be in the "THOUGHTS" section of this site, but that section will now be converted into blog posts. We figure that anything like that that's mostly just us brain barfing like that is better suited as blog posts than dedicated site articles.
But anyways! New blog! We've been working for a while to make this happen (mostly just putting the work off but it took ages nonetheless). We've been a bit desperate for an outlet to say our thoughts that don't quite justify dedicated articles on this site. We used to be on tumblr, and that was nice bc there wasn't a character limit, and threads were arranged linearly that made it easier to read through (seriously, why do twitter-likes insist on putting the previous context after the current context???), but that site is very much repressive in its own right, and the people there definitely all suffer from some sort of psychosis which is a bit contagious, and we realised that it wasn't really healthy for us to stay there.
And so we came to bluesky. It's like. Okay? Like I wouldn't say it's outright bad for you to be there, but it's definitely still fairly toxic, and you have to deal with the fucking character limit and weirdly arranged order of messages which were copied from twitter. Over time we've really come to despise the fact that we have to use it (the alternative is to have very limited human contact haha).
So we've been trying to make an alternative work out, but unfortunately there simply aren't any good options when it comes to social media, they're all overly controlling and purposely designed to foster toxic communities. So we've been trying to come up with a solution that's decentralized, that gives the users full control over their corner of the internet, that is ideally built on a system that people already widely used so that people don't have to use some buggy app (like matrix, it's cool but there's no way it gets mass adoption because it requires downloading one of many buggy apps and creating an account in a convoluted process).
And then we remembered: oh yeah, we have a website, blogs are a thing that exist. We began thinking about the differences between social media sites and simply having a blog, and it occured to us that with a simple change in practice, you could entirely replace social media sites. Posts become blog posts, your feed becomes an RSS aggregator, comments sections could become replies. And so we began planning the specifics about how this would work, and that's what took the majority of our time, just thinking about it.
The only thing that we really got caught on was the comments section. If we're trying to make this system decentralized, we need a way for people to post comments without relying on some centralized external system, like blogger.com or something. The problem, then, is in moderation. If you allow anonymous comments, then you will have a very frustrating time trying to moderate people, because your only option will be IP blocking, which is very easy to work around (dhcp, vpns, etc.) and isn't even necessarily going to only target that one person due, again, to dhcp. If you require people to make an account, then you now need to deal with managing an account system, which is a real pain and definitely not someone who runs a simple static website is likely willing to do. And in either case, you run high risks of several security issues, which is definitely beyond the scope of this idea.
And then even just regarding us wanting to start a blog like this, the prospect of programming all this from scratch was fairly intimidating. And so we put the blog idea off for a while while we focused on school.
And then we realized just recently: comments sections, as a concept, do not inspire conversation between individuals, but rather between fans and "the special one". Which is stupid. Not actually decentralized at all, it's just recreating the problems with social media sites, but spread out for a bunch of individuals. Upon realizing this, we decided to ditch the comments section idea, and consider other options. And then we realized that if we want people to talk to each other as equals, and the idea is based on blogs, then every person participating needs their own blog. And that idea stemmed into solving the other issues that stem from that, such as how people get notified, or what method would make this the easiest for people to use.
After these realizations, finding the more or less right way of going about things was pretty fast, and we found ourselves ready to start our blog (after doing some house-keeping for our site which we've been putting off). And so here we are! We're finally doing it!
We're still far from replacing our usage of social media sites, however. It is, in fact, less convenient to create an entirely new html page and put it on my website, than it is to simply type the thing up in bsky and hit the post button. This is where the app we're gonna make is gonna come in handy. It'll automate a lot of the process, and make it about as easy to post and talk to people as it is on bsky.
But of course, abandoning social media sites outright will likely never be a reality, due to the need for widespread adoption of this system. One can dream tho.
But yeah, expect potentially more of me actually using my site haha.