John Coulthart recently marked the occasion of the 5000th post over on his blog, which is not at all bad for 17 years of effort on his part. I am obviously nowhere near that post count (not even quite up to 100 yet) and it may take me as long to get there depending on things like, you know, continuing enthusiasm, keeping up a good posting rate, not dying before I make it to that point, etc… but he offered this consideration that resonated with me:
Post no. 4000 (January 8, 2016) arrived almost a year after I’d stopped writing every day, and had consequently seen visits decline as a result. (You can’t really talk about “readership” here when most visits will be from people looking for pictures of some sort.) The WordPress stats show that visitor numbers had been falling even before I stopped the daily posting routine, no doubt as a result of the uptake in social media. What’s interesting about the present moment is that the visitor numbers have been rising again at a time when disenchantment with social media is growing. I don’t think these two things are connected—I’m bound to see more visitors if I’m writing more often, as I have been since mid-2020—but it’s a curious thing sticking with an endeavour like this while vast internet edifices rise and fall around you. Since stepping away from social media myself I value the autonomy of this place all the more.
Yes. I haven’t really stepped away from social media as such, I’m still on it each day, but my posting to do it has become noticeably limited in recent times. Ironically, perhaps, it was actually someone on Mastodon who kind of inspired this thing here, cos on Mastodon you get a lot of talk about decentralisation (I know I talk about “Mastodon” like it’s a monolith but it is really a mass of individual communities on who the hell knows how many different servers) in opposition to the massive concentration of everyone on the Internet where venturing beyond the walls of Facebook or Twitter is scary. As I remember someone saying, Facebook is the Internet for a lot of people, a truly terrifying thought.
I no longer remember who said it nor exactly what they said, but it was something about how decentralisation Mastodon-style might bring about the revival of old-style blogging, and I just thought… hmm, maybe I should try that again. Back to 2002 when I first tried my hand at that, perhaps… so here we are now. (Parenthetically, I also found this post by Jeet Heer also pondering the revival of blogging on platforms like Substack, which Coulthart also mentions in his post. Although Heer has since been hired by The Nation and ended his own Substack thing…)
What Coulthart says about the “autonomy” of his blog is what struck me the most, cos that’s what I’m finding about mine too… thus far I haven’t exactly promoted it so I have no idea if anyone other than me is reading, but that’s fine. I suppose I can write longer form stuff there (I don’t know if they have a maximum word count or what it is if they do), but I feel like I’d need to explain myself there in a way I don’t have to here (“why is JG crapping on about 3D films like this? Richard who?”). And archiving on FB is shit; if I wanted to find something I wrote just a month ago it’d take me ages to find it again. This is a lot more convenient way of doing things. So I think I’m pretty happy myself with where I’m at; at least I hope I am given how much money I’m putting into the plan I’m on…
