My First Foray Into WriteFreely
Hello and good day. This is Aiko, also known as Clover Zero. For my first post here, I want to talk about my reasons for making this blog.
First of all, a little background of myself. I was born and grew up in a weird transitory period of the internet. While I couldn't experience the “old web” (personal web pages such as in GeoCities, shrines, blogs, and things like forums and LiveJournal, etc) in its full glory, what little I experienced stayed with me. For instance, blogs aren't exactly as big as it was before (putting aside how social media is also called microblogs – that's another whole can of worms), but I'm still interested in it.
I love to see other people's websites and blogs. And so, I want to make it myself, too. I tried to keep a blog a few times – from Wordpress, to FC2 Blog, to Wordpress again, and then to Dreamwidth (there might be other platforms I don't remember)...and yet, for some reason, nothing truly stuck with me. Over time, I keep stopping after losing motivation and/or getting too lazy to write anything or even open the website. But I want to continue. My last post in Dreamwidth was back in April 2023 and I thought of continuing it many times, even thinking on what to say upon my return, but I just can't bring myself to do it. It's so hard and I can't quite put my finger on why.
While I'm sure there are various factors, I think one of the main cause is how writing longer posts takes A LOT of time and effort. I started out enthusiastic, but I eventually burned out. In Dreamwidth, I decided to mainly post weekly roundup posts, which then changed to bi-weekly, based on my personal journal. I wrote my personal journal in Obsidian (a Markdown writing application), so I mostly copy-paste what I already wrote, but I still have to edit a few things, and sometimes I have to use or switch to HTML, which means more work (though I know there are Markdown to HTML conversions and vice-versa). Not to mention adding pictures, which has multiple steps (uploading it in Imgur or other websites and put it in the post with HTML). Oftentimes, I have to clean up the post as well (how it looks in Markdown and HTML can be different). I have a template to be filled in and various HTML codes ready to be be copy-pasted, but it still takes effort and time.
Perhaps this kind of hurdle is why microblogs like Twitter is so enticing and popular (Twitter threads is a thing) – it's very easy to do. You just open the website or app, click the “make a post” button, and you're ready to go (though in my case, even writing a Twitter thread can still take time). But social media like Twitter has a problem: its very transient nature. Yes, you can search for old tweets, but it's not as reliable. Yes, you can export your Twitter data, but IT SUCKS (this is a rant for another day). And most of all, as many realized after Elon Musk took over: Twitter can go down at any time and we'd lose our data built over the years. I'm sure a lot of my tweets over the years are not important, but there are real memories I don't want to lose there.
Of course, blogs can shut down too, but it's mostly much easier to export posts and maybe even import them somewhere else. It's much cleaner as there are no shared posts (retweets or reblogs) mixed it, just focus on the writing. I think the platform I'm using here, WriteFreely, explained it quite well in its about page. I'm not even going into the cons of centralized social media like Twitter and why I'm attracted to Fediverse very much (which WriteFreely is a part of), that's another topic entirely, but it is also a factor in my thoughts and decision.
Then, why did I choose this platform instead of going back to Dreamwidth? After all, I went back to Dreamwidth due to Twitter's impending doom. Well...I've always wanted to try WriteFreely, but I couldn't try Write.as, its flagship instance, without paying. I've been searching for an instance I can join for free. Around 2 weeks ago, I found this instance (though I've seen it before) and realized it's open for registration, so I signed up on a whim.
Yes, it's all on a whim. I've been neglecting it since then because I was unsure on what to do about it. But after mulling over it, today, I think I finally found the answer: I desperately need somewhere else to get my words out in longer form that isn't social media (and websites like Privatter can't do). I want to lessen my reliance on social media as an archive of my life and thoughts, once and for all.
As I said previously, one of the reasons why I keep stopping is due to the time and effort longer form writing requires. Though I want to keep it as a microblog, like to a Twitter thread so there is less burden, but as this post that ended up being too long suggested, perhaps I'm cursed to write long things lmao. At the very least, WriteFreely is simpler than Dreamwidth, so I hope it mitigates some of my problems and laziness.
(At some point, I got too lazy to even open Dreamwidth. Speaking of laziness, I do get too lazy to even post in social media sometimes, to the point of posting late or never at all, so perhaps – no, surely, a big part of the problem is myself lol. But that is a rumination for another day. On a separate note, I really love the concept of Dreamwidth, but for some reason, I can't fully get into it. Maybe because I wasn't around during LiveJournal days and thus don't know how it was at its peak. I can take a peek at the past, but it'd never feel the same.)
And so, I made this post, with the intention of starting my new blog journey in WriteFreely. This is undoubtedly still a trial. I haven't even gotten into comparing Dreamwidth and WriteFreely, that's for another post after I try WriteFreely more (and this post is too long already). Things may change in the future; I might cross-post posts to Dreamwidth, or move back to Dreamwidth, or even use them in tandem somehow. For now, I just want to try this new platform and get my words out. There will be no weekly or bi-weekly roundup of my life and media consumption, just my thoughts.