Digital Gardens; Tinkering is fun
There was a time way back when I had tremendous amounts of fun tinkering with my website. My first true website has been a blog, a photo-gallery, a webcomic, and just a plain mess and I’ve loved each iteration of it.
Social media killed that.
They weren’t all bad, not at first. Those were fun days, when we were trying to figure things out and had a blast doing it. When we shared what we were thinking (Bear stuff) and the creativity was flowing.
The website was abandoned by the side of the road. Delegated to be no more than what came after the @ in my e-mail. There was microblogging, there was pokes, there was fun. Then there was... meh... and now it’s shit. Nothing else to say about it. It’s largely shit. Enslaved to the algorithm, living under the fear that you’ll lose your account for gods’ knows what arbitrary reason Mammon’s sycophants have decided on.
I like tinkering with my website. I like being able to do what I want with it. It is mine, and it does not need to be perfectly polished. I’ve fallen down that trap before, where the site had to look sleek, professional and cooooool. You know, like in all the squarespace commercials that Youtubers are pushing. (I hate squarespace). I am coming to my senses. My website needs to be what I want it to be, my digital garden. My digital nexus where I post my ideas, writings and [insert item 3 here] while the social media should be for syndicating it.
I don’t want to be dependent on the whims of tech bros and their machinations. And I don’t want the ideals and ideas of what the internet is and can be that they have managed to gaslight us with.
This is a digital age, for better or worse. And putting all our eggs into the social media platforms ends up with rotten eggs. Better be safe and own your own platform. Keeps the eggs fresher, and it’s bloody good fun to tinker with. So for the first time in ages, I've started to put together a good ol'fashioned blogroll. Figuring out what that should include was surprisingly easy.