
Hiding
Instead, this morning I am back out on the patio with my coffee and my low air quality trying to get in a few cool hours of work before the sun breaks through the smokey haze and starts to charbroil the air again for the day.
I have been watching politics on social media for the weekend as it goes that a years worth of news happened in the last week, and since I’m deeply reluctant to even so much as dip a toe of participation into those murky waters, I have been lurking and thinking and working on this website. There has been this quiet revolution (that will of course go virtually no where) as people start raging once again about how terrible the social media platforms all are. Xitter has gone full batshit and the manchild owner is now posting full on racist memes, election interference and violence inciting posts, probably as much to get people talking about the site which he is destroying as it is that he believes this drivel. The facebook-adjacent platforms are seemingly hiding all but the most pg-rated posts and leaving anyone else who is either offensive or (apparently just as bad) possessing a low follower count, out there yelling into a void of nothingness. And the other platforms? Well. Ugh.
As all these people yell and scream at their digital bondage, a few folks are gently reminding everyone that managing your own site (ie. running a blog) is one of the simple remedies to both take back some control and mitigate the impacts of private centralized social media ownership.
Those who have been following me for the 25ish years I’ve been online know that there hasn’t been so much as a long weekend when I haven’t had some kind of presence online, and though I abandoned my big old “bradgarten” blog nearly eight years ago now, I have been nurturing a number of smaller replacements, some general topics and some very niche. There has been respectable traction, too. No. I’m not a viral sensation or anything, but a couple of my smaller niche blogs are getting enough eyes that I I needed to add page caching to the site to handle traffic loads.
On the other hand, I’ve been working on growing this little microposting platform over the last couple years. It initially just started as a way for me to post some pics online because (a) I was taking a break from the socials and (b) I was going on vacation and wanted to share some pics. I built a little insta-clone and it was very very basic, but in the two years since I initially launched it I’ve uploaded a couple thousand photos and added a long list of new features, and in fact reached a point here in the last month or so where I am comfortable calling this my replacement blog. It’s not exactly software everyone would be comfortable using, and no one is going to want a copy or anything, but I’m very happy dumping my more public thoughts here and calling this my online hub than I am, say, trying to nurture a bot-ridden facebook page or playing the instagram-everyone-is-a-vendor at this trade show problem.
So there we are. If you have been checking this out, it’s not going to substantially change or anything. I’ve added lightly-subtle ways for me to build this site into something more robust that a scrolling photo gallery, but that spirit is gonna stay. And in the meantime, you might see more posts here that get deeper and longer and more interesting than random pics. But the spirit is all gonna stick: this is not social media, it’s a private website for me to post as much or as little as I feel like, about whatever I want to post, and the only algorithm dictating anything is the little meaty one inside your head.
Share and enjoy.