The only reason I can wipe sweat from my brow, knowing this does not target me, was that in the Spirit of Indieweb I bootstrapped my website with what I was already doing on the internet: obsessively slurping up content and judging it according to my own peculiar taste. Too many techies out there make a blog because they wish they were the kind of person who … well, the FOSS superhuman… who writes voluminously on topics that make them seem cool.
Now, if this had been vague enough to touch on “time spent on website”, me and my handcrafted pixels would be looking Less Great.
Between like 2012 and 2017 I was convinced I wanted to have a blog but just hadn’t found the right workflow that would help me write things on it.
Blogger -> WordPress -> self-hosted WordPress -> github pages w/ jekyll -> self-hosted ghost -> hosted ghost -> buttercms with custom written frontend -> plume -> sendy (technically for mailing list). And I’m sure a few I’ve missed in between.
While I did write a few posts each time, I think the list of technology changes above is longer than the list of actual posts I wrote.
Overall the last piece was actually the most useful for me because I didn’t feel pressured to write insightful original content and could just write short posts or comment on links I’d found interesting etc. Which…like you said OP was stuff I was already doing elsewhere on the internet, so I stopped duplicating the effort.
See, that’s exactly it: I love having the content duplicated! Not everyone in my life is a link aggregator person, plus lemmy doesn’t yet do user follows, so being able to share stuff and know someone may like it in one venue or other is pretty cool.
Yeah, makes sense. For me, it was a journey to realizing that most of the time I just really don’t have anything interesting to say and am far more of a consumer than a creator.
Then in my brief spurts of creativity I spend it basically setting up a new blog thinking this spurt will never end, but then by the time I’ve got things set up I don’t have much energy left to actually do anything with it.
So really I just need to finally realize that and next time the creative mood strikes me just use what I already have set up.
You know, back in the day, one thing Tumblr taught us teenage girls was the role of curation, in between consumption and creation. The more accessible examples are probably kottke and boingboing–it’s “just” carefully selected links to stuff other people have done, but the variety and flavor of it all makes it worth it. This is all just to say that I think there’s a lot that can be interesting at the intersections of whatever your interests are, that you can curate for other people in a way they couldn’t find for themselves, whether or not you’re in that moment of having something to say.
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