The dichotomy of blogging
First off, before anything else, I just wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who emailed me regarding my last post — people sharing their own struggles, or with tips for getting free stuff, or simply to say they appreciate the post/my writing. Thank you thank you thank you. It's incredibly heartwarming to read others!
Now, having said that, it feels really weird when a post on this blog goes "viral". If I had a nickel for every time that happened, I'd have two nickels — which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice. And I guess that's the dichotomy of having a weblog. It's a log on the web, after all. For everyone to read. At least, this one is. But it's personal stuff. My personal stuff. That, at the end of the day, I mostly write for myself, not others. I've never once started a blog thinking about becoming popular through it (I'm not counting the time I started a newsletter on Substack as blogging, after all it was purely for professional reasons).
When I was a teen, I wrote to let the angst out and to connect with fellow angsty internet teens. We linked to each others' blogs and always left comments. It's funny thinking back, because I don't remember using RSS for blogs specifically, so I guess we'd always just keep commenting back and forth and visiting each others' web pages constantly. We didn't have a lot to do on the internet back then. lol First of all, there were no smartphones. All we had was a desktop computer. For me, I only had blogs, message boards, and ICQ. (For a little while I did use IRC, but it could get pretty scary; I met lots of creeps as a minor there and stopped logging in.)
And I'm starting to realize it's the same reason I created this blog — to share a few thoughts on the ether, to read others' thoughts and comment on them, to get a handful of comments back, maybe. To log my feels so I can go back and read them because now, more than ever, my memory sucks and I forget about my own life (thanks, covid).
What isn't the same, I guess, is the scale. Now as an adult on Bear Blog and on the general blogosphere, I don't have the same feeling of a tight-knit community of the same handful of people commenting on my stuff and vice-versa. There are so many blogs on my RSS feed! So many interesting people posting all the time that I see on the Recent Posts feed, always new people popping up on the Trending Posts... And comment sections are not 'in' anymore. I mean, there are a few blogs that have one, but Bear itself and the blogging culture of the present is really discouraging of comment sections. I myself don't have one, I even disabled the guestbook (but that was bc of technical reasons). I guess we're now living through a phase of being completely burned out — traumatized? — by comment sections, but [old man voice] back in my day, they were so precious and important. Also — now I blog in English. The anglophone internet is much wider than the lusophone one. Especially on the indie web/blogosphere in the year of our lord jesus christ 2026.
So yeah. I'm not sure if I had a clear point to all of this. I'm not complaining per se. Just sharing that it is pretty weird to have a random post hit Hacker News (?!) when all I do is vent on the internet expecting to be read by five people. Wild.
Writing this down tho, I'm reminded I gotta organize both my post roll and my blog roll. Eventually. Hopefully soon. But as a good ADHDer, not today.