Moving in
Ahoi Landrats! This is my new blog!
Moving in is always exiting. The first night in an empty flat before you fill it with both old and new furniture gives you this feeling of adventure and seeing this empty blog template kinda does feel similar.
So to fill it with some old stuff before coming up with new things and thoughts, Ill just recount how I got to create this blog.
It all started when I finished studying and started working. Suddenly I had less freetime on my hands and after a while I found that both my former hobbies and my relationship suffered because a vast amount of that my time after work was occupied by checking instagram. Most times I opened it because someone sent me a funny picture only to get lost in the neverending stream of reels if, out of reflex, I swiped down after watching the initial thing i got sent. Afterwards I would spend literal hours swiping until going to bed and then going to work again.
After some weeks I made the choice to radically cut Instagram out of my life because this annoyed me to hell. I felt exhausted afterwards and my relationship suffered because I either was physically away or mentally. So I deinstalled the app. I kept a bookmark of the website in my phones browser because I didnt want to abandon some of my old commillitones that I occasionally sent memes back and forth with and it works fine, because after one or two swipes my phones browser just crashes if I find myself being sucked into reel hell again.
The problem is, when you stop one drug, you almost immediately start to substitute for it with something else. This something was youtube for me. All things considered it was an improvement to instagram reels in almost every way, but it still took up considerable space in my freetime that i whished to have spent otherwise often times when finally closing the app after too many videos. Thankfully the algorhythm is kinda dumb and recommends you things that are actually detrimental for the platform in the long run if it can keep you invested right now. After searching for some review about tablets, because I like tech stuff, the algorhythm recommended me a review of the remarkable E-ink tablet and because I watched content about Linux before it kinda put me into the „notetaking and productivity“ bubble and from there into the „leaving corporate platforms and embracing slow offline lifestyle“ bubble and fed me more and more content about leaving big platforms and „the algorhythm“ behind.
Like most people however I didnt quit youtube, I watched or listened to countless videoessays about how to leave platform X and why lifehack Y is better instead. After a while though you realize that this too is just a neverending stream of the same shallow messages regurgitated endlessly by creators. You have channels with heaps of videos showcasing their „productivity setup“ after completely rearranging it every 2 weeks because there has to be new content in order to sustain being an influencer against the influencer/attention economy.
More out of coincidence I watched a critique about podcasting in general where one of the main arguments was that the medium hides the shallowness of the discussions of lengty podcasts by putting the listener into a passive state while the host and his guests just ramble on for hours while throwing buzzwords.
The same is also true for video essays however I thought and out of curiosity got myself a medium membership. On medium of course some things are still the same because it is also a platform with an algorhythm that reccomends content. Many authors have one thematic that they write about weekly or even daily and there is much repetition there. Cory Doctorow is one of the people where I notice it often. He writes about very interesting things and often has very good and fresh takes, but there is filler in between that he repeats quite a bit. His content is still worth it though in my opinion.
Also just because on medium the medium is written word you notice much quicker if an article is actually good or if the Headline was interesting but what follows is just bloat than you would if just listening to a video essay in the background. So overall I think I like the situation I am in right now where I mostly read stuff on the internet and sometimes even a book if I had enough about politics, tech etc, because once I read on the internet the step to read some of the books my mother gifts me every christmas wasn't that big.
Coming back to the beginning of all of this, I now have much more freetime and are more active in what I consume. I can read things and spend time with my girlfriend as reading online is not as timeconsuming as watching video essays because after some time of actively reading and thinking about something you eventually get fatigue. Secondly reading stuff on my Ipad isnt as intrusive as watching a video when you are not the only person in the room and much more socially compatible.
Now the final step from reading to actually writing things myself is not a step taken out of discomfort with the status quo like the steps before, but mainly out of curiosity because someone wrote an article and said writing is fun. It is the first step in this more or less one year spanning timeframe that is not replacing something with a lesser evil, but actually trying something I did not really do before.
When I was a child I actually tried to write a book on my parents old pc one or two times, but never got past 10 pages or so and once in high school I had a website that I actually had running on the internet after learning to write html in class, even if it only ever had one or two articles on it. I always liked the idea of writing, but did not ever really go anywhere with it. This may be another one of those attempts that is then abandoned quickly, but thats really not a big argument if the process itself is what you enjoy instead of the finished product.
To be clear I don't consider myself particularly smarter than the average guy and don't want to brag how I bested the algorhythm while other people are still passive “sheep“ while watching video essays on youtube or browse instagram now that I occasionally read something again. This text is more or less just a recounting of how I ended up here for myself and also for others to see if they had a similar process or if theirs was radically different. Everyone who ends up on the „indyweb“ most probably didn't start there and had some kind of process/journey and I like to read about those processes. Also it may be interesting for those who also have that itch about their social media usage and might find it motivating that my story of mostly quitting social media isnt really about loss and deprivation, but about me now doing something else that I actually enjoy doing. (Though it would be quite a coincidence for them to actually end up here and read this)
What to expect here? Basically everything and nothing. I know how to do my own website, but I didnt do it because maintaining it is a bit of work if you do everything manually or you have to design an elaborate publishing pipeline where things get automated. Either way you have to do some work before you can publish what you initially wanted to publish. I have a medium account where I dont have this friction. I could just click on „write“ and write, but I dont because I have standards on what I want to read on medium and my own writing would have to hold up to that standard if I would publish there. Bear is the perfect middleground. I can just press write and write whatever I want, because on my blog there are no rules. My blog is pirate territory in case you forgot. At the same time if I would ever get bored of things being too simple I can still customize my blog with CSS to a certain degree. Also it is very nice to not be bothered about things like hosting. Lastly Bear is a platform that seems to be deliberately small and designed to not attract the kind of problems you have sooner or later on platforms backed by venture capital. Just in case it allows me to backup and export all my posts and if that function ever happens to be removed its not that hard to just copy text so I dont have a problem with Bear being a platform instead of this just being my completely independent and selfhosted website.
So if you made it through to here Welcome on my blog again! Have Fun!