Every so often I get stuck between a few bits of content I consume and suddenly an idea clicks. It might take a while to flesh it out, and work out if I haven’t got things backwards and just have some kind of frequency illusion of ideas. This one clicked straight away. Whilst listening to The Verge cast from last Friday, I suddenly realised that Google and SEO could be ruining blogging.
That statement is a little hyperbolic, but bear with me here. For me to try to explain myself, I need to pull in from the various bloggers that seem to systematically have a cyclical but at the times the appearance of an existential criss. We all, my self included, wonder why we bother writing any more. That’s because we are told this activity is, and should be, winnable.
You too, can live off the income from adverts, be sent nice things for free and reach the top of Google if you just sacrifice these things. Write about these topics, or think this way, or SEO your words beyond recognition. That’s how you win blogging and get loads of clicks. When blogging doesn’t need winning, it only leads to a sense of why bother putting this out into the world.
I understand that the idea that every post you publish needs to have a utility to the world is ridiculous. Whilst at the same time, by stopping and looking around online at the content farms and self-professed “winners” it is also a completely understandable reaction to have. At times, I feel like my blog has to look and function a certain way, so I can somehow be “of use” to the rest of the web. When in reality no one searches my posts, no one clicks the pagination, and that’s absolutely fine.
This isn’t another don’t do it for others, do it for yourself post - there are enough of them online. It’s a realisation that one of the backbones of the web, Google search ranking, and to a certain extent, social media, has ruined so much of it. There are a huge number of people still blogging and not giving a damn, but many more that don’t bother because of these feelings.
Perhaps we are edging our way back towards a better social web that encourages blogging more, or perhaps this is just wishful thinking. One thing I am certain of is that a lot of blogging has been ruined already, and it will take a concerted effort from us all to build it back up again.
Think way back to 2016. The X-Files came back after 14 years, a 4-inch lock of John Lennon’s hair sold for $35,000 and there was a baby born with DNA from three parents. Weirdness all around, especially on the Apple campus. They were convinced the iPad was the future of computing, deep into “what’s a computer” thinking yet still produced laptops with 3-year-old chips in them. Whilst everyone pointed towards a touchscreen Mac, they instead gave users a weird strip you could interact with and took away their function keys.
You can theorise the motives for this for longer than the Touch Bar should have existed. It lasted for at least double its realistic life span and was finally killed at Apple’s Scary Fast event last week. I bought one as soon as it was released, partly because I was desperate for an upgrade from my aging 2012 version, and partly because I was interested in where the Touch Bar would go. Convinced that Apple would turn this into a new interaction paradigm, and oh how wrong could I have been?
Looking back, I don’t think my confidence was completely unfounded. Apple has a history of being brave, this was the year of #courage after all. Even more so when it came to computing, and they usually got it right, or forced everyone else to concede. Whichever way it happened, my expectation was that the Touch Bar would become a selling point of the Mac. Unfortunately for Apple, they forgot that users who buy their ‘pro’ laptops, rely on the function keys — especially the doubled sized one marked escape.
The issue wasn’t that the Touch Bar was there, although questions of its utility dominated early reviews, it was that it now took multiple taps and more concentration to do simple tasks. Your use case may vary, but that was something I could put up with had the Touch Bar shown a real use case outside gimmicky scrubbing through timelines or swiping through photos. It felt half-baked at best, and thrown in to appease users demanding more from their Macs.
Some people believe this was to refresh the line before the real improvements of the M1 chip brought. However, hindsight is always 20/20. I think in reality, Apple saw this as a quick, easy fix to satiate those asking for touchscreens, as well as a perfect aid to the second generation butterfly keyboards. Unfortunately it appeared as a gimmick, got little to no support from Apple, and remained as a gimmick through its life span.
Honestly, I think it’s a shame that poor implementation ruined a semi-good idea. Apple clearly thought that this was going to catch on because the life span indicates so. My understanding is that production and lack of sales supported the entry-level MacBook having one for so long due to the cost of inventory. The design and production of the Touch Bar would make a great story, one we will continue to talk about for years to come. I can only dream of what would have been had they just put it above the function keys instead.
I got you with the clickbait headline. I mean it’s true, but as with most things, the real answer is: It depends. I read with excitement David Pierce’s article on POSSE for The Verge, as if it were some new technology to change the internet. The framing of the article aside, it is rare to see such excitement about boring indie web things like ActivityPub from the tech media. It feels as if one of the founding ideas of the internet, that one’s personal website should be the cornerstone, has returned like the proverbial prodigal son — and I love it!
This is a topic that is very close to my heart, one that has existed for decades but is gaining more traction since the demise of Twitter and the rise of X. I intentionally write about those two things as separate entities as I believe the start of one signalled the end of the other. David’s post is because of a wider spark and interest in the things that should have been building the web for a long time, as we escape from the web silos that have kept our content for themselves.
The idea is simple, it’s right there in the name, you Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. So everything that you want to post — whether it be an image, an article, a link, whatever — goes on your website. Whether you wish to call that a blog or not is up to you, but the salient fact is that you post it to a space you own. We could go deeper into the fact that you’re just renting space online from more gatekeepers, but I am not ready for that just yet.
In theory, this makes the most sense. You own all the content you put online, your Twitter thread that should have been a blog post, now is a blog post. Should the site you posted to go away, or you choose to leave, you still have the thing you posted. The problem is: The idea starts to break down when you consider that very few areas of the internet let you do this, and even if they do, it isn’t really correct and it’s far too much work.
Networks have different audiences, different people, different norms, different ways of engaging with the system. At some point, if you’re just posting to a bunch of places all at once, aren’t you basically spam? — David Pierce.
Dave Winer wrote the initial response I stumbled upon, who points out this fact articulately. There is an issue when POSSE is often synonymous with cross posting to different websites, and that relies on them all supporting the content you want to post in the same way. Should they do so (they don’t) you now need several accounts scattered across the web to do so, and frankly that is too much work.
Since reading Dave’s post,
, with good arguments for and against the ideas in POSSE — and a few missing the point entirely and ranting about something else. I agree, there are plenty of nuances here. As above, I think the idea is sound and makes perfect sense, I just think there is too much onus on the person to do the running around and manage the services. You can’t treat a social network like an RSS feed that people subscribe to. I guess you can, but that sucks a bit, doesn’t it.Social media is, and should be, a two-way street. Yes, there are bots, and if you are intending your POSSE to be one, then be explicit about it, but you should really be managing replies and comments on everywhere you post. Otherwise, it feels like social media ghosting. As I wrote about in 2022, posting as if you are there, and then not checking in feels horrible. Micro.blog is still littered with people that put in their RSS feed years ago, so it appears as if they are posting, but they left a long time ago.
This is where ActivityPub gets it right. This isn’t cross posting, it’s consuming the same post in several places. The replies are the same, and it doesn’t matter where they come from. The post I write on my blog, syndicates everywhere, it isn’t cross posting. My blog post is the Mastodon post (or wherever else works with ActivityPub), not a facsimile of it that I never see. I don’t have to go and check everywhere else it appears, I don’t even need an account anywhere else. My blog post is all that’s needed, and that is how it should be.
Not everyone agrees, of course. Manton Reece, who David interviewed for his POSSE post and subsequent podcast, thinks your posts should be able to be consumed everywhere. That’s simply because we don’t live in an ideal world where everything supports ActivityPub. It remains to be seen if Meta will actually bring it into Threads. So cross posting is all we have. It just requires some thought, and I am not convinced everyone needs to cross post everywhere. Unless you live off the clicks, it’s far too much work.
Despite my outward appearance, I am a massive introvert. I do enjoy socialising sometimes, but I have to refill my battery often and that requires some peace and quiet. Something that is at times really hard to come by in my life. Like everyone, I have to work to earn a living, and then I have a family to look after. So I have to try to grab bits of it as a when I can. There is nothing I enjoy more than reading a good book once everyone has gone to sleep, or getting up really early in the morning and sitting outside with a coffee.
At the minute, I have a strange prickling in my brain. An annoying sensation that starts as soon as I try to grab a moment’s peace. It is as if my mind cannot bear to be alone with its thoughts and as such has to distract itself as it looks to avoid it. This is the point where grabbing peace and maintaining it becomes the most important to me.
To feel my best, I have to force my brain to relax, to be alone with itself even more so than normal. I have written before about my tendency to always want to be on the move, and my failure to give myself enough of a break. Despite knowing this, and seeking a resolution for years, there is no peace in my brain. There are short periods of relief, where I put in some work towards helping myself, but these practices never become habit. There is too much life to cram into my time.
I don’t see a point where I schedule in time to stare at a wall, or detox myself from dopamine. I feel as if I can never attain true internal peace, despite how much I crave it. By accepting this, I would like to tell you that I have some resolution in my life, but alas I do not. No rest for the wicked, nor me.