Like a lot of other people, I did blog a fair bit in the mid naughties - that’s what you did, back then. Facebook was taking off, but wasn’t anywhere near what it is now (that is, trying to be everything to everyone). Twitter was also growing, but was still mostly marginal. Instagram wasn’t there yet, snapshat either.

Blogging was a less constrained version of a timeline - it was the way you told the world how you were, what you were thinking, what cool tech you were working on this week. You had a number of followers (mostly people you knew) who would comment, and small discussions would take place. Is it weird that it feels like it was a more innocent time? Or maybe I was just oblivious of the darker corners of the web and the world.

Twitter took over for me. It was faster, easier, no maintenance. You could follow people you admired quite easily. It became fun to compose pithy, 140 character snippets, putting as much wit and skill as possible. Soon the blog withered and died - I hadn’t put in the maintenance effort, and the last blog post lay there gathering dust while the engine got more and more out of date and I missed weeks of downtime.

Last year I realized that I missed long form. Writing 140 characters just doesn’t require a lot of, well, thought - you don’t need to work out pros, cons, different point of views. You hit and run. And that may lead to laziness of thought - longer text just require you to dig a little more, and to quote sources, and reflect on those sources.

Then there’s the growing realization that once you tweet, you’re giving away your content to be profited from. It’s curated, reordered and presented so that the company can generate maximum advertizement revenue. It may be aggregated and sold and analyzed by political influencers and marketers - and generally be used in ways you’d not want it to be. If twitter don’t like what you say or who you are, they can simply cut off the flow, and you have no way to appeal.

The decentralized web we started talking about in the naughties now seems more and more urgent and relevant.

More simply I like the freedom of just dumping stuff in whatever shape I like in a blog, for my enjoyment and archives just as much as anyone else’s. I make no commitment on how often I’ll blog or what it’ll be. I just want my own little corner back.