Is Today Blog Day?

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I shouldn’t even really ask the question, “Is today blog day?” Because the day has passed us by. It is now 11pm. So, if today was a blog day, I’ve mostly missed it, but that’s only because I was at work the whole time. Though, I did look at some sources to see if it really is, or was, blog day, on this here August 31st, and the results are … confusing?

So, January 17th is sometimes known as National Blogging Day, August 31st is also celebrated as Blog Day, and then September 19th is International Blog Day.

Whether it is, or not, I think it’s neat to celebrate “blogging.”

For a long period of time in the era of Twitter, I feel like the internet almost lost the idea of blogs and websites. In that respect, maybe Elon Musk did us all a favor, by reminding people that their thoughts and their lives don’t have to exist and revolve around one website. You can make a website, you can call it your own, and you can have it look any way you want, and you can write on it. And you should.

I talk about this in my “Why” slash page, but, I mean, it’s true?

So you’re on Threads now, or Bluesky, or Mastodon. What if Threads shuts its doors? What if the devs behind Bluesky run out of resources and they go offline? What if your Mastodon instance goes down and you don’t notice until months later? This actually happened to me. I signed up on Mastodon.lol and made a bunch of posts, gained a ton of followers … and then I had my little relapse back to Twitter for a while. When things started exploding, and the Musk took over, I was like … Well, maybe I should go back to Mastodon, again.

Little did I know, the admin shutdown the entire site, but … left the domain up. They left the domain up so that they could serve people coming to find their accounts, a gif expressing being mad, or irritated.

That’s great man. But I want my data?

Nevertheless, I eventually launched my own Mastodon instance, and despite having no plans to close it ever (unless by unfortunate circumstance), I still think it’s a good idea to have your own website, and your own blog. Why?

Mastodon is not held up by infinite resources. Your posts will most likely go away at some point (databases automatically clean things up to make space). The same goes for Nostr, the same goes for Bluesky, I’m willing to bet. Although, Bluesky isn’t exactly traditionally decentralized, but people like to say that it is (this is a topic I’ve touched on a few times). And Threads? I mean, for all intents and purposes, it’ll probably be there forever.

But the other thing about traditional social media? You post something, heck, something really good, something that gets a lot of attention, and likes … And then a day later it’s gone. Forgotten about. Lost in the code, like tears in the rain.

On a website, though, you make a decent post that people enjoy, and guess what? It’s not lost in the sauce. It’s still right there. And with resources like Neocities and Github, you can host a site, for free without any threat of ever losing anything, because you can keep it all on your hdd, or your favorite cloud service. Back it up to a thumb drive, burn it to thirty CDs (they must be cheap these days, right?), get yourself a floppy drive and put it on some plastic disks. With a website, and a personal blog, your data remains in your own hands. And that’s what Geocities got right in the nineties.

Corporations wanted to take this from you. They want your data in their hands. Your thoughts, your posts, your ideas, your dreams, all of it, on their own service, where they can use it at will, and sell it. That is eventually what the basis of Twitter became, and it is mostly the basis of every other corporate-owned and backed social media website, save Mastodon. No, I don’t think Bluesky ultimately has your best interest in mind. I mean, do I have to link to the article I wrote for a third time about their partnership with a company that’s using OpenAI tech in their software?

Sure, this all isn’t something that swaths of people care about. You can go on any of these sites right now and see people never having a single thought about their personal data ownership and privacy.

But for those who do think about these things, and care about them, you should have a website, a personal blog. You should have these things, because it’s not enough to setup shop on Threads and put all of your trust into Meta. You absolutely should not do that.

Those are my thoughts for this particular Blog Day, though. Get away from Twitter, and rebuild, rethink how you use the internet.