This is not the first blog I've started building. But it is the only one you will be able to find online. I do have plenty of public profiles spread across the internet, on LinkedIn, Mastodon, Instagram, Github, Steam, and so on. Though you won't find more content on all those combined compared to this blog. And that is because I find my relation with internet privacy a bit complicated.
Back when both me and the internet were young(er) I did feel more inclined to share stuff online. It was normal for pretty much everyone around me to have a Facebook, Twitter or Hyves profiles and be active in creating and sharing posts with eachother. Over time as Facebook lost their appeal, me and my friends eventually reduced our social media interactions to sharing Instagram reels. Which is essentially the point where I still am. I occassionally browse LinkedIn or scroll through Instagram, but that is basically it for me. And in this I've currently limited my interactions with the platforms to that solely as a consumer, no longer a producer.
I know I generally keep a low profile due to multiple reasons;
- I don't want to embarrass myself.
- I don't feel like I have anything to share that is worthwhile.
- I don't want to be interesting to the wrong people/organizations.
As you see there are a lot of "don't"s in there. And the reason I've decided to create this blog anyway is because behind these "don'ts" there are subtle wishes for some "do's". Most notably that I want to write stuff with the idea that it's out there, regardless of whether anyone is actually reading it. I would also like to reach out more and have interesting talks with random internet strangers, and that means giving up some privacy. I really admire people that do this and make cool stuff to put it online. The latest example I can think of is this guy that introduced me to the indie web, where he also put his website onio.club.
So the fact that this blogs exists means I've decided to let go of some privacy, I just like putting my name under things. And I hope that I'm smart enough to prevent getting seriously abused from making my presence known. Which makes it sound as if I've been looking at the web from the perspective of the dark forest theory a bit too much. And though this comparison between space and the web is not entirely crazy, I'll be out in the forest as I'm sure my web neighbors are nice :)