(Why) I'm back!

Well well well. I’m back! Again!¹ So, what have I been up to?

Where ya been, Ben?

Well, for a start, I have been posting a bit to my “Now” blog (which I’ve taken down), and to a semi-private family blog, that I plan to syndicate² to this one. I’ve also been unbelievably busy parenting a baby who then became a toddler, who is now a semi-independent, toilet-trained, kindie-attending lil’ kid. I find myself suddenly looking around, blinking in the daylight and trying to remember how to be a person in the world. How to best use this little chink of “me time” or rather, the sliver of energy that I find myself suddenly left with at the end of the day. I’m even getting up early in the mornings for me, and not just because someone is screaming³.

Cool. But Ben, a blog? Really?

Yah, really. I know, I know. It’s a throwback, I’m ancient etc etc. But c’mere, listen. Blogging never went away. It just turned into Twitter, Bluesky and Substack. The style evolved, that’s great. The act of jotting down thoughts or composing thoughtful screeds and firing them into the ether or a cadre of loyal readers became more mainstream, and that’s great too. What truly sucks is that we all centralised our activity on platforms that at best didn’t have our interests at heart, and at worst wanted to actively put us in harm’s way for money and lolz. I was part of this rush to Big Tech, I loved joining the party, but over time as the platforms went truly rancid and the billionaires who owned them put on the squeeze, I realised that I had been seduced by the frictionless connection they offered, and that I’d never paused to consider the lack of exits.

There are federated social platforms, and I have an ActivityPub server that I use to interact with mainly folks on Mastodon. It’s great having up to the minute news, and I like being able to chat with a few people, and toss out the occasional silly thought, but the ecosystem’s not as fizzy as Twitter was at its most fun. There’s also a lot of culture clashing going on as waves of people flee the other platforms and join up, unaware or disinterested in the existing norms.

Leads to some bad vibes.

Fundamentally, these are less naive times. Even people who aren’t following how Big Tech’s mask has slipped can feel the adversarial posture of what feels like every company on the internet, all competing or colluding to separate you from your money, your data, or ideally both.

To get to “Why a blog?” I have to step back a little bit⁴.

I’ll write much more about this at some point, but Nathalie and I have been trying to move away from Big Tech, without losing the fun that playing with tech can bring, when it’s not being used against you. I’ve been self-hosting a bunch of services and now that we both suddenly have this chink of time and energy back, Nathalie suggested that she’d like to find a way to bring her blog back. The infrastructure I’ve been building up over the last year or so made this incredibly easy, so I was able to quickly spin up a Wordpress stack of containers, add it to our reverse proxy and voilá, https://blog.nathalie.ie was (re)born.

Scrolling through it, a blog that she started in 2009 – 17 years ago! – brought me rushing back to those days, and made me envious of her treasure trove of memories, the comments from old friends, gorgeous photographs. A sort of journaling in public that was her personal corner of the internet, a place that she owned. Nobody was going to monetise it, algorithmically remix it, optimise it or otherwise turn it against her.

I wanted one.

Of course, I have felt and acted on this feeling before, so I have a handful of old, broken blogs started and stopped. When I wanted to get into computer game development, I started a blog where I’d comment on news and games I’d played. I had a job for a year or so writing reviews of DVDs (remember those?) and games for The Irish Independent. I had my “Now” blog where I updated on what I’d been up to. I consolidated writing from all these sources into a new blog, using a new tech, and this is now my home online.

For what it’s worth, I’m a bit more optimistic that I’ll stick with this one. I’ve been posting semi-regularly to the family blog, and have become even more trenchant in my quest for digital sovereignty. I’m not going to be seduced by a Big Tech platform again.

Fine, a blog. What’s the plan?

I noticed a few things when I looked through old posts of Nathalie’s; they made me want to write about my aesthetic inner life. Some of my most fun conversations in group chats are around the movies, TV shows, games, music and pocasts that I enjoy, and I wanted to crystallise that joy in a more permanent way. I am also developing and responding to some big ideas about our digital lives and wanted a place to be able to hone those thoughts without them just being fired out into someone’s timeline.

I don’t have a strategy, this isn’t a product, I’m not trying to make it my business. I hope you’ll stick around, and hit me up by email or in the comments if you want to chat.

It’s great to be back.

1. Anybody who owns a blog for long enough will post several “I’m back!” posts, it’s inevitable. ↩︎

2. It’s how I say “copy and paste”, because I’m a sophisticate. ↩︎

3. Well, not always because someone is screaming. Sometimes people are still screaming, but it’s happening less and less. ↩︎

4. It’s a blog post, baby! ↩︎