New Year, New Blog

Every once in a while I get the urge to start a blog. Sometimes, I even do. Usually, I don't get very far with it.

I like to share my thoughts and express myself, but I guess I always get a little too self-conscious — is it too vain to shout into the void? To think that anyone cares? It always goes the same way: I'll get a couple of ideas out, clam up, and then shut the whole thing down, embarrassed to have been so exhibitionist, deleting the whole site from existence. I don't even know the number of websites that were dedicated to my output that have completely come and gone at this point.

And yes, I do like sharing things and expressing myself, but now I'm starting to wonder if I'm getting rusty at it. So here I am, once again giving it a go, if anything just so I don't lose the muscle.

Maybe years of corporate social media fine-tuned to squeeze out as much engagement as possible didn't help. The constant feedback on the worthiness of how or with what you choose to express yourself can give you a complex. Hey gang, I did a thing! Oh what, 3 likes? That's it? Guess they hated it, huh. Well the algorithm sure thinks so, so be prepared to repeat this crushing cycle in your desperate attempt to claw any bit of endorphins you can from this whole process, as you'll get progressively less visibility on each post.

Around 2020 or so I ditched Facebook for maybe the second or third (and final) time, and I'm a lot happier for it. Around that time, a lot of my websites (hosting webcomics I had made, games I was developing) started getting the axe as well, not just for the usual "I'm embarrassed" reasons, but also because the pandemic left me without a source of income, so there was just no rationalizing keeping those monthly/yearly hosting/domain fees. At the same time, I was also getting more into creating music, and had plenty of avenues to share it on streaming platforms (also beholden to the algorithms). I tried for a bit to play the Instagram game to try and promote what I was doing, as I was getting increasingly desperate to turn music into a source of income. That, combined with the endorphin trap that is the black hole of near-zero engagement algorithmic social media left me pretty disenchanted. Once I finally felt fully rejected by Instagram, I all but left the platform completely, only taking years to actually delete my account because they had the audacity to ask me such personal information as my date of birth (the nerve) before proceeding with any log in attempts.

Twitter took a little longer to go, but it was pretty easy motivation once it became clear to me that the sale to Musk was actually going to go through (not to get all "I quit Twitter before it was cool", but hey). It was the last of the big social media platforms that I used to use. Throughout this whole saga of ridding myself of socials, I had sought out alternatives such as Mastodon, and I'm quite happy to be on there, but without all of the manipulation and games brought on by an algorithmic feed, I find that I'm not drawn to using it in the same way (Which is good! To be clear). I had essentially become a digital ghost. If you didn't know me directly, there wasn't much in easy ways to contact me, and you might not find much evidence of my existence at all if it weren't for a LinkedIn account that only exists because it feels like anything otherwise would be career suicide. This leads to a problem though: in my pursuit of insulating myself from the rejection I felt from social media, I had lost any and all spaces that I had to express myself and share my thoughts (and no, I was not going to become a "LinkedIn poster"). Years of social media had made me complacent in finding or creating those spaces for myself.

Last year Donald Trump started a trade war with Canada, accompanied with rhetoric around the annexation of Canada to become the 51st state of the United States of America. Like many Canadians, this pissed me off, joking or not (he wasn't). If he, backed by the billionaire tech oligarchy who so willingly sat behind him during his inauguration was going to try to harm us in order to upend our entire way of life, not one red cent of mine was going to go back into the USA. I immediately canceled my YouTube premium, Amazon Prime, AWS, Google One, iCloud and Xbox Game Pass subscriptions. Chump change for these tech giants, but it's what little I felt empowered to do. This sent me down a path of discovery: what do I replace YouTube music with? Well I have this old desktop lying around, let's try installing Jellyfin on it. One DVD-RW Drive purchased from the local computer repair shop later, and I'm ripping CDs like I used to for my mp3 player, only now I can listen to it on whatever device I'd like. This action sent me on a path of trying to replace more services. AWS was replaced with a VPS from Web Hosting Canada, based in Montreal. I did some digging into PeerTube, and while I think it would be aspirational for this one to fully replace YouTube, you gotta be the change you want to see in the world, so I fired up my own instance, fully intending on using that space to share dev logs for game projects (and I will! I swear). At some point, I realized just how vulnerable we all are to extreme sanctioning (which again, feels like a very real possibility from this guy, it happens, especially if he decided economic power wasn't enough to force the annexation issue) and decided to look into hosting my own mail server so that I'm no longer dependent on gmail.

This year, I'm going to continue with my deep dive into decoupling myself from American tech companies. I don't trust what Microsoft is doing with GitHub, so I've started an account on codeberg, and will likely start moving some projects onto there, starting with the source for this very website. It's not much, but it's got some neat things in it, like a little script to automatically pull all videos from my PeerTube instance into its own section on the site. The videos that are up now feature some short clips of things I've been working on in Godot. I'll likely delete them later and replace them with a proper dev log about that project, but they're there to show off the feature in the meantime. The effort to de-google will continue as I test the waters of relying more on my mail server, and strive to move more and more of my digital storage back onto physical drives or other providers. Work on this site will also be ongoing, as most of the pages are still blank and need to be filled with content stuff. These aren't so much as resolutions as they are just... things that I am currently doing.

Some of these services could simply be replaced by others hosted and/or owned by companies elsewhere, but I'm finding I'm becoming increasingly interested in asserting my own digital sovereignty on a personal level. That brings us to here, my personal website. Another in a long line of personal websites that I have created and destroyed. But this time, I feel a stronger sense of ownership. This time, I feel more pride and excitement over it, and I'm not concerned with being perfect. So hopefully, it sticks around.