So this is it. This is where the journey starts. I finally get into blogging. After telling myself for the last three years that I finally should get around and create some meaningful content I made the jump into the cold water.
What mediums do people use for communication
It’s 2024, start a Tiktok, bro.
— Gen Z
Open a YouTube channel and tell me to like and subscribe.
— Millenial
Use Bluesky or Mastodon to have a intellectual discussion with me.
— Yet another Millenial
Communicate via Newsgroups or Mailing Lists!
— The greybeard boomer(?)
Why blogs are superior
What differentiates a blog from all of these alternatives? I’m in no position to answer this but my gut feeling is the simplicity and the open nature of the medium. You don’t have to rely on a third party service. There is no big technical setup required (from the guy who needed three years to fork a blog template). I don’t need to dress up all fancy dancy to make a video or shoot a picture.
The closest alternative to this is the mailing list. But I haven’t really seen that in use for general communication, more for bug tracking and technical discussion on a specific topic. Also I feel communicating via such a medium would shrink my reach to such a small nerdy bubble that I could also avoid the hassle of writing alltogether.
Therefore a blog it is! Just some last advantages that I enjoyed over the last years:
- You harness the power of RSS to allow subscribing to posts via your favourite reader client (shoutout to this free hosted FreshRSS)
- It improves my writing and typing skills (as you may guess from the domain name I care about these a lot).
- Would I ever feel the need of migrating somewhere else I can take the blog with me.
- The power of plain text is unbeaten. 1
My first post ever
Congrats, you just read my first post ever. It was probably a little short, I’m still missing a tool for spellchecking, my formatting is lackluster and it’s information density quite low. But it was mine and I enjoyed writing it. It was time well spent instead of watching cat gifs on reddit or consuming uninteresting youtube videos. I will remember writing this post more than most things that I do after 22.00.
And maybe, just maybe you’ve found it interesting as well. The best to you, out there. Much love for reading blogs <3