yo wadap

the dying light of the big app-based social internet is pushing a lot of people i know back to blogging. it’s something i used to do across a variety of platforms (livejournal, vox, myspace) before microblogging took over (facebook, twitter, tumblr, cohost) but always as part of some other network, never something i just did on my own platform.

giving this a shot not because i think i write particularly well, but because i’d like to get better at it and see if it’s a satisfying outlet for whatever junk comes to mind.

additionally, and maybe actually most importantly, i want a place that is truly mine. bluesky can be fun but it’s just twitter and that won’t change. my portfolio site is self-hosted, sure, but that’s hardly a creative space itself. this can actually be an outlet.

i’ll soon post about my tech setup in detail, but i ended up making my own custom theme for publii loosely based on daring fireball. i like his visual format for posting, it’s somewhere between twitter-microblogging and like full ass blogging. miniblogging? i’m calling it miniblogging. actually really close to the tumblr/cohost style, really, just more likely to get long-winded here compared to bluesky.

the other cool piece i tacked on is a bluesky-based commenting system. now – this kinda runs counter to my self-hosted ideals, but i did first install a different commenting system that was fully functional and self-hosted… but found it undesirable that everyone had to make a unique account to post in it. and then i’d have to do spam moderation and stuff… i dunno. the bluesky solution feels cool. i don’t own or control the data, but anything worth having a conversation over would probably have also happened on bluesky anyway. this consolidates it and lets me use their tools to moderate. we’ll see how it goes, this is all an experiment anyway.

broadly though, a hope i have for 2025 is a return-to-roots for my online life – audit my relationship and usage of the “essentials” and take control and ownership where i reasonably can.

and then blog about it.