Finding a Safe Space at the End of the Internet

I miss Google Reader, y'all. I really do. There was this perfect time, preserved in the amber of my memory where I remember a site I would kill time on at work, and page through endless streams of interesting, human-written and generated writing and artwork. These would be on tumblrs that were curated by actual people, journalists on new blogs, my photographer friends on flickr, my artist friends on deviant art. To make sense of all of these disparate sources, you had a few options. You could have a monster bookmark folder, and open them at the beginning of every day and scan for new content. If you were extremely savvy though, you could have aggregated all of these RSS feeds into Google Reader, and page through them in one convenient interface.

It even had the beginning of a social network- I was connected to about 10 extremely online friends and we would see each others comments on interesting stories, and only theirs. They could flag stories and they would then show up in my inbox for me. In 2013, Google shut down Reader, in favor of their new social platform "Google Plus". If you've never heard of Google Plus, that's because it was an absolute failure, but the damage was already done. Google Reader is no more, the replacements like feedly are fine, but really don't capture its utility.

All of the blog networks I mentioned before are gone, flickr is nearly dead, tumblr and deviant art are censored beyond all utility, and the blogs are all churning out AI-generated clickbait listicles and reaggregating each other.

Platforms today are increasingly hostile to creators and unpredictable. Platforms can vanish at the whim of a fickle muskrat. Today, the Tiktok ban has started to take effect, and Meta is instituting new anti-LGBTQ policies in its moderation. All platforms seem to be embracing an AI focus which is just not interesting to me. Of all the current platforms, bluesky seems the only one I'm even moderately participating in, but even then I am wary of yet another platform. In this day and age, our content is not our own.

The only solution I can find is to try to carve out my own domain, an old-school HTML blog. I can post whatever the hell I want here and not worry about being suppressed by the algorithm, or being censored. I'm having quite a bit of fun here, I've decided to go with a pretty bare-bones static-site generator called eleventy and I'm hosting the static site on Cloudflare pages.

One nice new feature I am using is a comment section powered entirely by the aforementioned bluesky. For all my enabled posts, if you comment on the thread in bsky, they will show up below here 👇 as an old-school comment section.

Let's try this out, y'all. I really hope this is the next step in the internet, and I'm eager to see what all my creative friends do next.

FYI, the blog artwork is a sketchbook drawing of the cat from Flow. If you haven't seen this movie, it's absolutely amazing, go out and watch it immediately.