wow! this reaction to what iāve said is very much overkill to a friendly nudge of setting expectations and the type of culture we have on the forum.
i gave you alternatives of how to voice your dissent to the blog posts themselves. this is a thread to share links to blog posts and encourage folks in their journey to write their own blog posts. iām not sure how else you couldāve taken your post than being judgmental to an entire community of folks that you havenāt yet interacted with since you are new to the community. where did i psychoanalyze you?
i think youāre doing a fine job of demonstrating your own character. is there a reason why youāre immediately jumping to taking everything iāve said in bad faith, as if iām out to get you? assume good intent, please! i am assuming the best intent of yours and answering you in earnest. maybe it would be best to take a break and come back when youāre able to re-read what i wrote, perhaps in a different mindset.
just as a reminder: i wasnāt stepping in to tell you to get back on topic. i was stepping in because you made sweeping statements about our community came off as rude. āit seemsā is not enough of a hedge to offset that.
iām sorry if you somehow feel as though this level of moderation, however minor, is such a slight.
our community guidelines might clear some things up about tone, topics, etc. please dm me if you have any other questions.
thank you! i do actually keep a journal that i write at least one page in every single day. im just testing out the waters of how it feels to scream into a (mostly) empty void on a blog that only a few strangers are actually going to read.
thereās some comfort in throwing thoughts out into the void in my opinion. i hope you keep blogging. whether it be tough topics, happy topics, really anything you choose. iāve found it greatly helpful in not only my mental health journey, but in life overall
Thank you for writing this. Itās interesting for me to read the perspective of someone whoās actually in that situation. We all have different digital upbringings and I suspect we all have a slightly different perspective on this topic.
That entire post resonated as another early 20-s yapper! Though I may add language barriers to why it feels like a bigger deal to blog ā having messy grammar and speech in general feels more okay on a tumblr reply than here or on my blog!
Also worth noting that I reply here rather than by email ā in part because that way other people can see/interact with the things being said, much like you gestured towards! I do love forums as a middle ground (Tumblr being on one end and my site on the other) but also think that replying to things in a big āreplies pageā on my site is something I should do/get back toā¦ (I have a single instance of me doing it for something I found interesting but couldnāt quite get behind fullyā¦)
That was a very interesting perspective and itās experience I relate a lot with, so thank you for sharing.
I grew up with strict gadget control, in a country that was only catching up to what the English-speaking world was calling the āinternetā. I was constantly informed by the school and by parents of āonline safety and privacyā and all the ways social media and phones is ābadā for the youth.
I still used social media thanks to peer pressure. But for some reason, I didnāt use it and enjoy it the same ways my friends did. I rarely shared personal pictures on stories and never participated in those silly TikTok challenges. Instead, I wrote about news I cared about, books I enjoyed, science I was passionate about. I would write down my thoughts in what my friends back then would call the āessay formatā and post those big walls of text instead. Pictures and media alone didnāt appeal to me as a medium for expressing my thoughts a lot of the times. As I expected, barely anyone cared, and posts with media got the most engagement.
Naturally, I drifted away from posting to socials, using these platforms just for catching up with friends. I started to write elsewhere, and eventually turned to blogs.
Would I still blog if I was brought up with todayās social media? If I was given a similar education that piqued my interest in books, articles, and writing long-form, then yes, absolutely.
Were I becoming an adult today, I would not have a website. I would not have a blog. Nor would I be on social media. I would, in fact, refuse to use the internet at all except for work or to interact with the government, banks, and other essential services.
Curious: what is stopping you from doing that now? I mean, you are an adult today after all.
Habit and defiance. I will not stop doing something that has given me pleasure since 1996 just because a bunch of technofascist creeps are hellbent on turning the internet into cable TV with a comments section.
I was here first, damn it, and if anybody wants to drive me out theyād better hire an exorcist.
Re: your first linked post, Iāve seen a lot of these fluffy type āorganizationsā and websites that seem to promise a whole lot, but donāt really have anything concrete when you look into them. Iām with you on thinking theyāre mostly useless at best, and probably harmful at worst. It looks very much like a venture capitalistās idea of a charity or NGOāgather money first, deliver at some point in the future?
Talk is cheap. Iām not impressed. If folks really want to donate towards a better web, Mastodon and many others take donations directly. I also try to donate to the folks who run the servers Iām on every now and then to help with costs. I think those donations do a lot more to help the open web than these silly resume-bolstering projects do.