Taking my words back
Still there? Welcome to the new one.point.zero, you rare person actually reading this.
Recent years haven't been kind to personal publishing online. Social media took over with its immediacy and mobile-friendly form. And, like many, I migrated to that world of short attention spans, updating my "status" with the odd link or comment while this site gathered digital dust in the background.
But I've been feeling an increasing discomfort with the idea of creating content for these closed and often walled gardens. Their dominance is reaching frightening proportions. They control discourse, promote abuse, and they harvest users like seeds in a giant data farm.
Also, one day, maybe far into the future, they will die or get bought. Why give them control or ownership of your content?
There's been a movement in some corners of the web to encourage a shift (back) to self-publishing and away from gated communities like Facebook, Twitter and even Medium.
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web is one of the most comprehensive articles on the subject.
If you work in the design/communication industry, consider this essay introspective soul-searching by one of your own. If you're a regular web user, consider this an appeal to demand a better web, one that respects you instead of abusing and exploiting you.
Parimal Satya, in ‘Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web’.
The Web began dying in 2014, here's how details the shift in power balance to a handful of internet giants.
It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic.
After reading these two articles and many others like them, I was finally galvanised into moving my arse by Jeremy Keith's talk at the Mozilla View Source conference in London a few weeks ago.
So here it is: my content, my words, my domain.
The backend is a modified/kludged version of the Django code behind Simon Willison's blog (Update: the blog is now running on Wagtail). I've started adding webmention capability and hope to add more Indieweb goodness in the future.
It's still a work in progress. Visually and structurally. The original version of this site went live in December 1998, nearly 20 years ago, and most of that content is stored in backups. I plan to import as much as I can.
Blogging is dead. Long live blogging!