hey everyone on the interweb, firstly, sorry for the broken english, it is not my first language. i’m writing this from calcutta, india. my chosen family and I have decided to start a decentralised blog using writefreely. The above link is for the same. we want to build awareness about privacy issues and being safe on the internet while being able to have a place where they can put up their thoughts, and if need be use it as their collection of works.
all that is nice to think about and i would say we jumped in without much thought given as well. Even though about 15 of our friends and acquaintances have joined up, not many is willing to put out their work as such. neither older work nor new. upon enquiring, some mentioned issues with formatting so we have done a markdown guide, which made some people post, but another issue arose which is at the end a new platform, and for most of us whose first language is not english, this is a daunting task. there is a perceived value of a blog being good and some of them want to present things nicely. which is understandable.
we have made that people can now start as many blogs as they want, keeping as many hidden as they can. we will deal with storage issues when it comes to it, as we plan to keep the blog local, focusing on bengali and english content.
now what we are struggling with and need guidance about is what we should do to increase awareness? we want to increase users obviously, but we also don’t want non queer non creative people. we also do not have any idea of monetisation. and we honestly do not want to use community content to monetise. we can host fundraising but idk what should be the value proposition. so i am asking you all for some guidance. i just want people in my city and country to be more aware and carve out their own place.
To get a compliment out of the way first, your basic guide to using markdown in WriteFreely is superb. I plan to make it my go-to reference.
I also see that your blog is an offshoot of a queer publishing group. Love everything about what you’re doing. I embrace the sincerity in your questions, and on the blog. I am sitting 14,000 km away from you, feeling similar feelings.
If you will indulge, I have no answers but wish to express my own questions:
Applies to art and non-art. Today I cleaned. Yesterday I did not. Does that make today better than yesterday? Does that make me a better person today than I was yesterday? Is existence enough?
I often jump from one thought to another like that, and see everything as linked. The links between art, existence, worthiness — how I evaluate myself; if & how I choose to present myself, shared with others; and the role the responses (or lack of responses) by others play in the value of what I do, who I am.
I am a 51 year old, white, queer, US American cis man, identifying as an artist for 30 years. Since 2020 I gave up “outside work” and spend my time reading, researching, thinking, writing, and making art. I do not make a living — that alone is sufficient evidence that I am not doing enough, not doing the right thing, not proving that my existence has value… at least according to a particular point of view. Rejecting that point of view is part of the mental work I am doing to accept myself and all others as worthy by virtue of being living humans on this shared Earth.
I do not offer answers. I have endless questions.
I wish you well.
Rob
P.S. On community & being found: I am using Kbin right now. I am also enjoying the Fediverse via Mastodon, Pixelfed, Firefish, Funkwhale, and WriteFreely. I found your post by searching Kbin for “WriteFreely”. I have a blog on Paper.wf that is not permitting any posting at the moment. I came here in hopes of finding answers, or a Paper.wf community or WriteFreely community. Yet another example of the difficulty of being found and finding connections is that these Fediverse offerings are truly wonderful assortments of largely lovely people — and they pale in numbers compared to those other awful places that I am used to. It is difficult for me to find meaningful input from more than a handful of people anywhere on the Fediverse. I am working on it. I believe what I want/need is not easy to find, on- or offline. In any case, I did not find any explanation for why my WriteFreely instance Paper.wf is not working. Instead I found your authentic expression of hope for connection. I suppose I wrote this response instead of writing in my blog (that no one sees 😛). I hope that Paper.wf resumes functioning some day. In the meantime, even when the Fediverse has technical flaws or I am not making many connections, I still feel happier and healthier here than in other online options.
I was put into a missionary hostel as a kid, at around 10 years of age. I had access to computer there, as in my village electricity was still not available. computers were something fascinating, and we didn’t have internet, but that didn’t stop us from setting up peer to peer chat and file sharing. once a week, for 40 minutes, this was the most fun we had in school. I got a personal laptop in college, access to actual fast internet, in around 2012-13. torrents and all were blocked, but we could still use dc++ for p2p file sharing. It felt free. I always imagined internet to grow into that direction honestly. Things are simple enough, everyone has agency, and it doesn’t take a lot of effort from the user. There is a higher margin of error for mistakes and it’s not threatening.
I feel the decentralisation offers similar experience. it’s not exactly like a p2p system like dc++ but it’s close. I understand how I look at things is different, but more often than not i have been othered based on my identity in school and colleges, and more often than not p2p systems had been a respite where as regular systems were always toxic. the anonymity, the control, made me feel like i’m not being ogled at. I want the same in our community blog also. where the writing matters, the work matters, and not the identity.
i am 29, i couldn’t finish my college education, and never really held a steady job. I have been explaining things for others for a very long time and i have been doing that and freelance creative work to sustain myself and the publication. we try to use the technology to try to make sure the authors get to publish freely. i don’t want the next generation of our people to feel like they don’t have a space that is not controlled by big corporations and algorithms. i also want to share how i set it up, so others can also share things. I didn’t know paper.wf is shut down, tbh, it’s only last year that i got to know about web3, and activity pub is something i got to know after the threads update. But the more I read about it, it felt the right place for the time being. I actually struggled to set up a multiuser blog as there was not enough documentation about it. also, if you want to write on our blog, we’d be happy to send you an invite