I’ve started checking my RSS feed less and less recently, probably because of burnout following two years of compulsively checking the news as both the political situation and actual physical situation around me was being reduced to rubble. One thing I do still like to check on is my category of assorted blogs. It’s fun to see what other people have to say, and if you’re reading my words right now, you probably share in this mentality.

Today, while procrastinating on going to bed once more, I refreshed my feed and got hit with a post by manuel moreale posing a somewhat odd question by another user:

To all bloggers: If you were born and brought up in the time of modern social media, where Twitter and Instagram have always existed, would you even blog?

Following the link trail I could find quite a few people pondering how it would be to be born into this weird, modern world, while I scratched my head going “guys I’m 23 and went through this, it’s not that unique of an experience.” I’m not saying this to be abrasive, just to point out that the question could have been phrased as a question to those who have done it rather than assuming they’re not in the room itself.

Regardless, as someone who was still in kindergarden when twitter first launched¹ I feel like I’d be a good voice to add to this conversation. So to restate the question for my own sake: Why am I blogging despite being brought up in the age of modern social media, where twitter and instagram have always existed? And why won’t others?

The reason why I do it is, frankly, because I am a nerd with way too much free time on my hands who loves to put unnecessary amounts of effort into things I cannot put in my resume. I have a small raspberry pi in a closet in my parents’ house where I run 10 apps I barely use, just so I can look at it in satisfaction knowing I could use it someday if I needed to, if that gives you any indication as to the type of person I am. Making a blog was way more work than setting up my twitter, reddit, and instagram accounts combined, and to this day I have a bug in my brain going “shouldn’t we just post these to social media?” Still, seeing my little corner of my internet with its own little flourishes and touches gives me a small rush of satisfaction, moreso when I show it to people in real life and get a surprised yet impressed response.

Additionally - I like to yap. A lot. My mouth is a motor that does not stop unless closed shut and I often warn people who I talk to that I am capable of talking nonstop for literal hours, so for them to feel free to interrupt me or to bluntly ask me to stop talking. Social media is built for and around the idea of fast interaction and consumption of content, which is not a bad thing necessarily, but is a different appeal. I open tumblr on my phone when I am half braindead and want slop to feed into my head, and I open my RSS feed for when I actually want to engage with ideas. This doesn’t mean that either format is locked into the mentality I have outlined, just that that’s what’s incentivized.

Finally, I like having something that I know won’t break under my feet. I like dumb appliances that do what I paid money for them to do, and apps that just work without having to download six apps and sign up for a newsletter, so with the growing enshittification of social media its good for me to have a website I control wholly and entirely in terms of content, presentation, and AI usage (AKA none of it).

Now for the second part of the question - why don’t others in my age demographic blog more?

To start, my yum is their yuck: they don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time setting up a blog. While people argue about which blogsites take less setup or are easier to start up with, it’s a fact that all of them take way longer than it takes to download twitter and make an account on it, and that’s discounting how long it’ll take to weigh all the options against one another and the 20 kilos of FOMO and “but what if I opened a blog on the other site?” Not to mention the fact social media sites are thousands of times more user-friendly in terms of presentation.

Secondly, blogs are much more lonely. This is not coming only from a mindset of “I WANT ENGAGEMENT AND LIKES ON MY POST,” but rather “hey I want to talk to people about this idea I had, and replying is much more convenient than emailing people.” I still use email, to be clear, and even hooked it up to my domain name, but it’s still a much older technology that takes just much longer that people are deincentivized from using it.

And finally, because of all of the above making a blogpost is seen as a Big Deal. It is a Big Post that you put on Your Site and people respond with A Formally Addressed Email. I don’t personally believe in this mindset but I can entirely see why my friends are hesitant to post despite having a lot to talk about. The fact that social media is so instant and dumb makes it so that there’s a very low mental barrier to posting. “Who cares if it sucks? Everything here sucks!” It’s the equivalent of using Comic Sans on a first draft to make yourself be less harsh on yourself. On the flipside, a blogpost is An Entire Page on Your Website which Stays Forever and Needs To Be Uniquely Visited rather than being a blop on someone’s endless doomscroll feed.

So, how do we fix these issues? I don’t think we can, honestly. These are not issues, they’re inherent to the experience and the ideas of social media and personal blogging, respectively; it’s a feature, not a bug. To make personal blogging more like social media would detract from the appeal for personal bloggers, and to make social media more like personal blogging would detract from the appeal of social media users.

I do think we could make the setup easier - make it so that getting a blog that’s easily editable and an RSS feed are a two-click setup rather than a 400 click and 30 minute ordeal, but this would only really create another “option” that potential blogcreators need to judge when they try to join rather than solve the problem at its core.

If you think this idea has merit and would like to invest some computing power into it, by all means, power to you. I’d love to help you out, but as stated before: I run a raspberry pi out of my parents’ closet. I don’t have the space nor RAM for something useful.