The Internet is what you want it to be
Reclaiming our digital autonomy through blogging? It's a powerful reminder that we can shape our online experience rather than being shaped by platforms.
As I’ve been going through my old blog posts as I move them over, I found this post from 2018 from when my Twitter account was suspended for reasons unknown to me. I had stopped using the service at the end of 2017, saying that the service had “become more noise than signal” and had “outlived its usefulness” for me. (This was still five years before ownership changed hands to its present owner.) To be fair to Twitter support, they apologized for the error, saying my account got inadvertently caught up in other suspensions, and they reinstated it…even though it was dormant.
At the end of that essay, I wrote the following sentences, which unfortunately turned out to be awfully prescient:
The point of this mini essay is this: When you create content, unless you’re hosting it on a platform that’s wholly under your control, there’s no guarantee that it will be out there in the future. That should give everyone pause. Because today’s Twitter nonsense might have greater ramifications for society tomorrow. [me, June 2018; emphasis me from 2025]
I’ve had some sort of blog for the past twenty years. Unfortunately, the early years were wiped out by a WordPress update gone awry in 2014, but I can’t imagine anything I wrote while in high school or just out is of much value for discourse today. (Some things are best left, well, left behind.)
There have been two different things that have guided my return to blogging, and now in its fourth incarnation. First, I know that no matter what I write, it’s here and it’s not beholden to anyone else’s platform. If something goes pear-shaped on the tech stack I’m using to host this blog now, the source material is just a series of Markdown files that live in several backed-up and synced repositories.
Second, I know that whatever I write here will stick around and will be easier to find. The technologist and developer Scott Hanselman often writes and speaks that we only have a finite number of keystrokes left before we shuffle off this mortal coil. So here, I can keep a permanent* record of things I want to say and share with others, and then perhaps they’ll be useful later on.
But that’s another essay. Someone who’s been at this blogging thing for even longer has some thoughts on this. While my essay started in a bleak tone, this offers a hopeful wish for the internet.
Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do. Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life. [[Matt Webb, February 2025](https://interconnected.org/home/2025/02/19/reflections)’; emphasis mine]
The internet is what you want it to be.*_ Make it good.