Blogs are weird and I do not understand them
I first posted this in 2024, then reposted it on another blog, Meander, that I since deleted. I just thought about it and wanted to give it a home again, so now it lives here.
Of course I knew what a blog was before finding Bear1 I read blogposts and used tumblr (…), and I think my mother had a blog for some time, too. But I did not know about the technicalities (RSS!?!?!) and the culture of blogging. And although it took some time to set this whole endeavor up2, it is the culture-thing that is the hardest for me.
I am used to Twitter and Bluesky, where posts have to be short and draw attention. This combination rewards posts that say divisive shit3 and punishes those that are nuanced and complex. It is easier to wish death onto some asshole politician than to explain what they did wrong. If you want to write something personal or sincere you have to meme and/or bury it under ironic detachment.
Like posts on microblogging platforms, blogposts follow their own principles and fall into their own patterns.4 Blogposts can be long and lingering, they allow nuance that the logic of the timeline prohibits, divisiveness does not guarantee attention. And not only do they seem to allow for a more personal writing style, they reward it. For example, Bear as a platform seems to favor specific kinds of posts: The suggestions on its discover-feed include, next to articles about technical stuff and blogposts about blogging, often personal stories that feel very intimate and earnest5 and function as a kind of fable that conclude with some (rather obvious) moral.
Conceptually I get these posts. The personal anecdote is for blogging what the shitpost is for twitter, it just works. Blogs lend themselves perfectly to this personal, reflective kind of writing. But for someone used to reading impersonal, hyper sarcastic punchlines on Twitter all day it is very hard to not find the 43rd story about your great productivity awakening a little too much.6
This may be an initial discomfort that goes away after some time. I know that I do not want to write personal anecdotes, so I will not. Still, I feel myself (here it is again, if you did not notice) conform to this blogpost-subjectivity that seems to be the only alternative to mean tweets and cold scientific papers. It is weird and I do not understand it, but this will not keep me from writing.
I learned about bear and the vastness of the personal web or small web or what ever this is called through this YouTube Video by Psychool (it got deleted, but there is a re-upload here.↩
This is an exaggeration at best and a lie at worst. What took me the longest was finding a name for this thing. Unwissen means ignorance (literally no knowledge) in German, btw.↩
Am I even allowed to say bad words?↩
This feels like a platitude, but every medium specifies certain uses (Gebrauchsweisen), as Dirk Baecker writes in "4.0 oder Die Lücke die der Rechner lässt" (27).↩
To the point where it feels like an intrusion to read them.↩
All this is, off course, vastly exaggerated. I am to lazy for nuance.↩