Mental model shift to start blogging more

This quote1 has motivated me to start blogging again:

Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)

Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.

Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life. — Matt Webb, Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected

I’m conducting an expirement to help me get started.

Rules2 I want to follow:

^^3this hits me hard haha as an “author of custom static site generator” 4

  1. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/19/matt-webb/ ↩

  2. https://interconnected.org/home/2020/09/10/streak ↩

  3. https://rakhim.org ↩

  4. https://github.com/oxalorg/genox ↩