"Blogging" since 2001-ish

… well, sort of. This is part three of my “Metablogging” series, which initially was planned as one post. Part 1 introduces my new blog, and explains why I am ditching WordPress.com, from a technical perspective. Part 2 is a (re-)introduction of myself. And this post explains what to expect from me in the blogosphere, if that is still a thing. I’ve only recently heard, that IndiWeb is a thing now, and it is basically just having web pages like you used in the 90s.¹ So maybe “IndiSphere” as the new blogosphere is coming up next? If it is, don’t forget that you heard about it here first! 😉

Initially, this was the title I was planning for my very first blog post, or to use it as my tagline. But it seems weird to name your first post like this after nearly a decade of inactivity like this. Or have I been inactive? And didn’t I post my first blog post on 15^th May 2008? Let’s dial back a bit…

Humble beginnings

I started my internet journey at the turn of the millennium, when my parents finally allowed me to get a dial-up modem. One of the first things I made use of were IRC, mailing lists and web forums. Besides that, I created my first private homepage.

It was a constant work in progress, and I was overly proud of it, but from today’s perspective it was horrible: “Best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0”, overloaded with useless scripts, like a script that simulated a “monitor quake”, and it had the Star Trek Deep Space Nine title melody in an infinite loop in the background - the audacity! Well, I was still somewhat of a kid, between the ages of 16 and 18.

But my website was not only full of animated GIFs that I collected on 3½-inch floppy disks. I also started compiling my first thoughts and ideas into small articles (back then as subpages). At first those were more static thoughts, but later I went looking for discussions on web forums. I soon became infamous for posting a lot and for formulating lengthy posts that were generally considered to be of high quality.

Those were really great times, and even today I remember them fondly. Not only did I get to know some incredible people during that time (some of whom I still have sporadic contact with). But it was also absolutely formative for me, to have so many deep and fruitful discussions with so many different people whom you could open up to on a whole other level (as in a way they were total strangers from the internet).

Wind of change

But times change, and I changed. In the mid 2000s I did my German Abitur, was called upon by the state to do my Wehrdienst, declined that, so I had to do Zivildienst. Then I moved cities for my job training. You can read about all that here.

During that time, I started working on my second homepage. I wanted a clean slate, and my texts got even more professional, citing a lot of sources: a Jabber-Guide, an Easterhegg 2005-Report, or a PGP-Tutorial, among others. I created a “News”-section right on the front page, so people would instantly know if there were any updates, or new subpages.

But because I was constantly switching places (my home town, work, and the Fachhochschule), I did not have private internet access at my own flat, was using forums less and less, and turned my website more and more into a kind of blog: I used my “News” section to tell my friends when I would be at which location, and I posted news about my life and experiences there. This was still pre-social media.

But even before social media forums were dying. Even my favourite place on the internet was slowly but surely declining in traffic, posts and reactions. One reason (besides us all getting older and having life happen upon us) was the rise of Web 2.0. Everybody was starting to have their own blogs, then Twitter came along with microblogging, and more and more people were moving towards those. Only afterwards did StudiVZ and Facebook become a thing.

I blog… therefore I am

I loved my website. I spent hours with it, I was the only one in my class having one (and I was the only one thinking it was cool 😁). So initially I did not want to exchange it for a blog. Unfortunately, it was a lot of work mimicking a blog in pure HTML. It lacked interactive features, and last but not least, it was on a free hoster that was starting to introduce more and more annoying ads.

And while I did not like the creative limitations of a free service solution like Blogger, Tumblr, or WordPress.com, I did appreciate the ease of use and all the social features. I even “hacked” some of their limitations, e.g. by opening three blogs, but integrate their design so it looks one blog. Still, it’s not the same if you know your HTML, CSS and a bit of PHP, and JavaScript, and knew you could achieve the functionality you wanted if you only had access to the code… Of course I dreamed about running my own instance of WordPress but I couldn’t afford my own root server back then, and I would have needed one, as WordPress demanded running a complete LAMP stack. So I had to work with what I had.

I started my blog after returning home from my semester abroad, (and in hindsight I regret not starting one before that, because it could have made for some nice travel logs). My blog started with “I blog… therefore I am”. In it, I discuss why I actually did not want to blog, but still felt that I had to, because in my perception blogs were to the 2000s what homepages used to be to the 1990s. Seeing myself as a digital native, I still wanted to exist in the World Wide Web somehow, I guess.

What good did having a blog do for me? I managed to (re-)connect with some people over my blog, some came from other blogs and we started reading and commenting on each other’s thoughts and experiences. I started Geocaching because I read about it on a friend’s blog, I visited BarCamps because of posts on BarCamps on other blogs, I participated in so-called blog carnivals, and I managed to stay in touch with some old friends, whom I haven’t seen or heard from in a while. People would either comment, or more often write me an email about a blog post I did. That was something I never managed with my old website. But the biggest benefit was that I was forced to improve the quality of my posts, to really think about what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it, how I could justify my conclusions with a list of references. Sometimes this led to a different outcome than I anticipated. It basically made me a better thinker.

I had some posts that, for my standards, went through the roof, with my top clicked ones being these:

• A tribute to Evanescence / Amy Lee (17k views)
• My self-experiment on Uberman sleep (9k views)
• My participation in 2 of the 3 very first MOOCs from Stanford University (7k views)
• A solution to problems related to a PCIe port on Linux (6k views)

In my most active years I had around 10k views on average. But with great power comes great responsibility, and with a new decade came new fades, and blogs were thrown out like yesterday’s jam.²

The German Internet Extinction

I think there were many reasons why I stopped blogging in the 2010s. The weird thing, though: I’d say I never really stopped. I just moved my blogging elsewhere.

In my perception, the German blogosphere of the 2010s was shaped by fear. Incompetent politicians, lobbying, and greed by certain players, led to something that I coined German Internet Extinction.

I was small enough to fly under the radar, but bigger and more popular bloggers I knew were starting to run into problems. Basically, an entire new industry came into existence: Lawyers sending out en masse Abmahnungen, usually including a Unterlassungserklärung, effectively a lifelong desist contract that would still hold up, even if the relevant laws changed later. This also included:: The lawyer’s bill of 1,000€ to 7,000€, payable by you.

There were cases where lawyers sent out 20,000 - 30,000 such letters. The mistakes could be absurdly small:

• no imprint? → Abmahnung,
• no disclaimer for linked pages? → Abmahnung,
• no visible credit when directly accessing an image? → Abmahnung.

And if you are now thinking: What the hell is he talking about? Well, that is Germany for you, where politicians have no clue about IT and laws started becoming absurd. Post regularly, and you were treated like a print medium. Therefore every blogger needed an imprint, aka a “dox yourself” page (because as a private blogger you wouldn’t have a company address).

And if you did not explicitly distance yourself in writing from the content of linked sites, you could be treated as if you had appropriated their content, becoming liable for wrongdoing on their part.

One of the weirdest cases, and the reason for my “German Internet Extinction” post, was this: Lawyers teaming up with photographers, who uploaded images to sharing websites under licences that allowed no changes but required attribution. Then lawyers would send you an Abmahnung, because if you used the direct link to the image, you would no longer see the attribution on the surrounding page. As if lawmakers did not know how the internet works.

I was scared as well. I did not have an imprint and didn’t want one, partly because a crazy ex-girlfriend was stalking me, and partly because I could not fulfil certain legal requirements with WordPress.com anyway.

And during that phase I talked with one of the better-known bloggers in the region of that time at a BarCamp, who suddenly decided to shut down his blog — in favour of G+.

Becoming Social

Google+ was Google’s take on a social network, and it was definitely superior to Facebook in almost every way. Of course you could use it for private things, but especially on G+ people also shared more or less professional articles, kind of like a blog.

The perk? No German lawyer or company wanted to go through Google’s legal department just to get at one user’s data for a cease-and-desist. And Google did not care about German “Impressumspflicht”. I guess that convinced a lot of people. Maybe not everyone was radical enough to close down their blog, but I got myself a G+ account that day, and it was my first real social-media account before I became active on Facebook.

Problem was, once on Google+ it was easy to jump to the next service, and my drug of choice, unfortunately, became Facebook. I actually found Facebook even more limiting and annoying than WordPress.com, but on the plus side it was fast, easy, safer than having your own blog, had all my friends there, and gave me a broader audience.

I think a combination of all these factors, plus the possibility for me to reconnect with so many people was really intriguing and I moved more and more of my posting to Facebook. Again, there were other reasons as well (personal as well as temporal and preferential). Some of my posts really had blog qualities; they were long, they had links to relevant sources, I argued pros and cons, etc.

So the argument that I am making is this: I actually never stopped “blogging”. I wrote articles for my own private reasons and put them on the internet for free, to share with the world and to discuss with whoever was interested in them. I just did it in different formats; I did that before there even were blogs (on my website, and web forums), as early as 2001 and I continued after abandoning my actual blog in the mid 2010s.

But not everyone liked that. At the beginning, my Facebook contacts consisted of close friends and family, who mostly knew and followed my blog. But then more people came from other contexts (work, school, acquaintances, friends of friends, etc.), who were annoyed by the quantity of my output. In turn I started to be more selective, about where I post what, so besides Facebook groups and sites, I start spreading my content to more specialised services:

• Goodreads
• Trakt.tv
• Letterboxd
• bluray-disc.de
• blu-ray.com
• Musik-Sammler
• Discogs
• Backloggd
• BoardGameGeek
• Photobucket
• Flickr

What once had been my website and then my blog, now became content for user profiles of too many different web services, like butter scraped over too much bread.³

There are many dangers and downsides to moving your activity to social media, which might be worth an entire blog post on its own to talk about.

All Hail the Algorithm

To make things short, you are dependent on the platform: on how it distributes your content, on how it uses your friends and followers to advertise, on what it allows on its platform, on how long you can retrieve your data, or whether the platform even stays around. I have seen posts disappear without explanation from Facebook groups I administered. The same is said about YouTube comments, and I have even heard of at least one case involving private WhatsApp messages.

You don’t own the data you share, you often even agree to that in the Terms of Service, and in worst-case scenarios, you’ll lose everything, either because you get banned (maybe for just reasons, lately more often for unjust reasons)⁴ or because the platform just closes down.

As great as Google+ might have been, after eight years, with 43 language versions, and 111 million monthly active users, Google just decided to shut the service down (not the first time Google did that).⁵ If not for any other reason, then at least this should make you sceptical to rely on any of these services.

I wonder what that guy is doing now, after shutting down his blog for the sake of G+?

This is also true for WordPress.com, only back then I did not think too much about it. The bigger issue, however, came when algorithms started deciding what people should or should not see. This not only patronises users in their content consumption, (and that in the worst way possible).⁶ It also pushes creators to behave in ways that please the algorithm, making them less free in what and how they create.⁷ This truly has changed forms of art and personal expression, into a mainstream industrial product aimed at consuming your time.

I detest this, it ruined Twitter and Facebook for me from a pure user’s perspective. Instead of reading what friends and family are up to, I am now mostly getting posts that best exploit the algorithm. Users have become the product, both as data profiles and as sources of time and engagement. And to me, this is not fun anymore; I’ve been reducing my consumption and production for years now. And now I am getting back to the roots. I have shut down my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and I am filling the vacuum this created with a new blog — with my own blog.

Becoming Anti-Social again

I’ve been living in this love-hate relationship with social media for years, probably ever since platforms introduced their algorithms. I’ve been using Twitter since 2009 and my last tweets are from 2020. I’ve been using Facebook since 2009, with a one-year break in 2020, a planned account-deletion post in 2022 that I never published, and my last posts are from the end of 2024. I never really got into Instagram, with an average of 10 posts a year, I am not even sure if this counts. But I have not been using it since 2024 either.

All the activity I used to put into Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, will now be bundled here. But that’s not enough. I am pulling out of all my social media accounts. And there are many reasons for it. The key reason I am doing it now is, above all, political and personal sovereignty. For over a decade, Zuckerberg passed himself off as the liberal good guy, claiming to make Facebook a “safe space” for everyone, and purporting to stand up for minorities.⁸ We always knew that this weathervane had ulterior motives, and that he wasn’t one of the good guys. But turning 180° from one day to the next, to please the new president who just won the elections?⁹ That is not only disgustingly spineless, it is pure opportunism, hurting people by supporting fascism. I left Instagram and Facebook after the incident with the LGBTQ hashtags.¹⁰ This was the biggest step for me; other services were easier.

An easy win is leaving Goodreads. Goodreads belongs to Amazon, and Amazon’s founder seeks cooperation with Trump and supports him openly, even though he is not engaging in the same level of sycophantic groveling, as Zuckerberg, he is equally enabling. This means, that I need a place for my reading diary and for reviews of books I read and decide to write about. And since a review is not much different from a blog post, I will pull these into my blog as well. For the diary part, I’d rather use an external app. There is BookWyrm, which is part of the Fediverse, and I have an account there: pygospa@bookrastinating.com. But I haven’t used it much, yet, and cannot tell how good it might work for me. There is also The StoryGraph and I really like its classifications of books on different dimensions, its statistical insights, and of course its progress tracking. And it’s a three-person female-led British tech company. So I am definitely keeping my account @pygospa. I might cross-post my reviews to BookWyrm and StoryGraph, or simply tease them and link back here. In any case, reviews will be written with this blog in mind first. Books already got their own section, and I am pretty excited for the first reviews in it.

For film reviews, as well as Blu-ray reviews, I used to use different services and forums: some don’t exist anymore, some had ugly community incidents, and some are still useful for logging and collecting. All these services are luckily not big-tech, partially not US-based, and not openly known for supporting Trump. The problem, however, is still data ownership. I will keep using external services, that offer functionality I don’t want to rebuild, like logging watch progress (at trakt.tv), or tracking my collection, (with my blu-ray.com account). But when it comes to reviews, these will be published here first, and might be cross-posted or linked. The same goes for music and games. I use Discogs, to catalogue my music collection, listenbrainz to scrobble my listening, Backloggd to log video games, and BGG for board games. But reviews belong on my blog for these things as well. These services will only be for cataloguing and logging, not content creation or publication.

Exhuming Posts

I am also planning to “rescue” my old reviews, articles and posts, from all these places and collect them here in one place. That is why it was important to me to have a post that is also a visual separator: hello, world!

I will start with the services that I am most eager to get rid of, such as Goodreads, Facebook, and Instagram, and re-publish any post that I feel valuable enough to keep online. Once that is done, I can truly shut down those services for good. I will keep the original publication dates, and add a note about where each post originally came from. I might translate German texts into English, because I want to keep this blog internationally accessible,¹¹ and maybe this will also finally be the opportunity to get into multilingualism with Zola. I might also edit some posts for orthographic, grammatical, or phrasing mistakes, but I will be transparent about that and note it on each post.

And once that is done, I will continue with the services that I will not delete or discontinue using, but where I want to gain control back over my data (WordPress, Trakt.tv, Letterboxd, etc.). So over the course of this year, hopefully, this blog will grow in size and become the central collection of all my work, possibly dating back to 2001-ish.