Making my own little corner of the internet
I've been lurking on bearblog for a while. I've even written some, maybe on another blog. I like the platform a lot. I like that it's ad free, and that sometimes the discovery feed introduces me to new ideas. Lately though, it's been much of the same. Sometimes it's about how terrible the news cycle is and this bad xyz thing happened and someone's opinion on it. Sometimes its complaining about the discovery feed (like my post here). Sometimes it's about data privacy, or anti-AI. And for whatever reason, there are AI-generated news summaries that make it on the platform. I don't really know the purpose of those, because to become discoverable on bearblog you typically have to pay for it, and there's not really a way to monetize your bearblog... so it's weird. Someone had to generate the post and manually click into the dashboard, and post it (unless they were automating it, which would not surprise me).
There's been a lot of negativity going around lately. And I get it, the world kind of sucks right now. But truthfully, there has always been some sort of turmoil in the world. I think that is the human condition, because as a society, we don't have anything better to do but fight. We see this dysfunction even in families that have all of their material needs met, but they don't know how to connect with each other, so they just fight and fight and fight.
I am making this blog to try to inject some positivity into a small little sliver of the internet. I don't know if I will stay on bearblog forever, neocities seems like a worthy contender that gives you a lot more control over some of the things you can do with your website. Bearblog is more of a blog website, and that's about it. To be honest, for most of us, even being able to access bearblog is a privilege. To always have running water, electricity, and basically unlimited food - I get that not everyone has a ton of funds, some of us can hardly pay our bills... But there is a good chunk of us, that are better off than the rest of the world. Just being able to have electricity, on a consistent basis, is a blessing. These are the little things we forget when we get wrapped up in the very negative news cycle. For me, I started going onto bearblog to see new ideas, maybe some fun things, seeing what people are up to, their hobbies, their feelings, what it is like to be an individual, to get away from the news cycle. But now, it always gets blasted up to the top of the discover feed. Even my little corner of the indie web has now been intertwined with the news cycle in some way. Yet, this is to be expected. As bearblog grew, I noticed that I found less and less posts on the discovery feed that I liked. At least on the front page, there used to be more journal entries, people writing about their hobbies, more "slice of life" type posts. Nowadays, it feels a little bit less fun. But there's nothing I can really do about that. I am glad the platform is growing and people feel as though they can post their uncensored thoughts.
Here, I hope to write about art, things I'm reading and learning, whatever random things. Maybe my thoughts on the world, and how to be a better person. I hope that whoever finds my blog in the end, finds it helpful.