On blogging

You shouldn't do it because others told you to.

I'm not a long-time blogger. In fact, this blog started in 2019, with some revamps along the way. I always liked the idea of keeping a blog, nevermind the fact that I, actually, like writing. However I was put off, during the years, by the classic internet opinion that your blog should have a wide audience, that you must build a community around it and that, in general, you should do whatever possible to make your blog grow in popularity (the classic american way). You have no idea how much this point of view is wrong and I started to write on my blog the moment I understood that it's not a popularity contest, but something that should make me happy.

However, for some more time, I posted links about my blog articles on the mainstream social media. It feel good when people discover your content and even like it, but doesn't felt right for me. That was the moment I completely grok that my blog is not about others liking my content, but about me doing something that I love: write about "stuffs" and show what I write to the circles I personally care about, in this case the fediverse. Sure, when I write a new article, I put a link publishing it in my honk. Yes, you can even follow my blog using RSS, but it's more akin to start a nice discussion with a bunch of friends. It feels natural, it feels something that I would do in front of a beer with the people I'm connected with online and it doesn't feel like I'm an "authority", responding to the peons in the comment section.

Consider my gemini capsules. To me, those are the first class citizens of my blogging experience, simply because I like it and the WWW version of the blog is clearly an afterthough, done more to play with some technologies than to reach a wider audience. Yes, I put some consideration in the fact that, maybe, not all the people in my online circles will install a gemini browser on their devices, and a WWW version of the blog is a nice gift to them, but this doesn't stop me from putting links to both the gemini and WWW blogs in an honk post. It's totally about myself and about what I like.

There are some points that, IMHO, people should understand to have a "happy blogging experience":

• You must not "commit" to your blog. Nobody forces you to write if you don't feel like it.
• Your blog is about your opinions and not about facts. You could write an article about the fact you saw a pink unicorn, yesterday, while on an acid trip and that would be perfectly fine.
• It's fine if you are not the best writer in the world, but you like to write. You're style will improve with time, and people are forgiving about language errors, in particular if you aren't writing in your mother tongue. If somebody tell you shit because of your writing style, that's a person is better not to have around.
• That's my POV: don't keep analytics or visit stats. I don't do that. Once somebody asked me: "do you have visitors on your gemini capsule?" and initially I answered: "some", but I really don't care, one, two, or one thousands, I put the content out there and if a nice discussion starts, great! Otherwise, I don't even log the visits to the gemini capsule, for instance, nor I log the visits to the WWW version of the blogs. I'm much happier like that.
• To reiterate from the second point: you can write about anything! Do you want to keep a blog with a speific style, or for a specific argument? More power to you! But never feel limited by that. for example, I have two gemini capsules, one "worldwide" in english and one "localized" in italian. As a rule of thumb, i write about local politics and whatnot on the italian one and more about tech on the international one, but it happens I got things mixed. That is perfectly acceptable.

More to the point. I never believed about having comments on the blog. There are various ways to contact me that I published, and I noticed that people tend to like to discuss on the fediverse. To me, that's awesome. It's public, more people can join the discussion, nice things may happen that way. But I will never use the top-down approach old blog engines implement, where you write the article and comments are listed at the bottom, like you, the blogger, is some kind of a rockstar.

Everybody has, potentially, nice stuffs to share. Of course there will always be the really, really good bloggers that will be famous, or that will have a huge swath of followers, because they are crazy talented people, but you shouldn't envy them. There is nothing wrong on blogging for your "circle" of friends, it's fine, it's beautiful and it's what the internet is all about.