For the last several weeks I’ve been perpetuating perhaps the most ridiculous escapade in quite some time - cross-posting blog entries to Wordpress, Tumblr, Substack and Medium at the same time. I’ve also been experimenting with both Threads and Bluesky - the hopeful pretenders to the pile of ashes where Twitter once stood.
I’ve come to the conclusion that no one blogging or micro-blogging platform is any better than another. Each is a walled garden of sorts. A silo. Each has it’s own captive audience, fighting to attract attention among their fellow platform-dwellers, like fisherman fishing for each other in the same small barrel.
I’m not going to lie. I miss the way the internet once was - before platforms came along. I know this makes me sound like a curmugeon - “it was better in my day” - but in this case I think it might have been.
Back when I started writing a blog - around the same time the oldest millenials were born - everybody hosted their own blog. There was a barrier to entry - you almost certainly had to learn about webspace, scripting languages, databases, and such like. “LAMP” was a thing (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) - it formed the foundations of what became known as “Web 2.0”. I’m guessing Web 1.0 was NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator rendering static pages.
Anyway.
Back in the dim and distant past you could install a blog script and start posting - and the world was your audience. Yes, it took effort to comment - you had to enter your name, email address and URL every time - but it meant you weren’t fishing in a barrel - you were casting your net into an ocean that covered the entire planet.
People added guestbooks to their blogs - where strangers that happened upon each others soap-boxes could leave messages - not comments - not replies - just “hi - I found you - love what you’re doing”.
Nothing was monetised. Nothing was tracked. Nothing was targeted.
Sure, the early days of the web were a little like the wild west - with wasteland for thousands of miles - but little by little a spider-web formed - of blogrolls - hand curated and published lists of blogs we had discovered and liked enough to tell others about.
Imagine that - encouraging people to leave your writing and read somebody elses - losing you clicks, ad revenue and attention.
Of course we can’t go back - we can only go forwards - but we can choose how we go forwards. With that in mind, I’m going to carry on cross-posting - because why not - and I’m going to start drawing up a blogroll. I will invite readers to leave their walled gardens and go on something of an adventure - to follow the breadcrumb trail out of the maze, and re-discover the world that so many seem to have forgotten - the world outside the walls.