grayestofghosts: (percy)
I was reading an article from 2022 Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media by Catherynne M. Valente and even if it's two years old at this point it still seems as relevant as ever. Bluesky is underway as the 'new' social media and it seems like some places on the fediverse are crashing.

The article talks a lot about LJ and the destruction of LJ that looms large in I'm sure a lot of DW users minds, considering that DW was born from LJ being gutted. It just makes me think, the thing about DreamWidth is that it's always felt a little like a bomb shelter, in that everyone wants it to be there but nobody wants to actually be here for long periods of time. For a long time, people threatened to move here whenever social media sites became unusable but very few people actually did, and when they did they tended not to stick around too much. Which is... sad? It seems like it could be a real thriving social media site like old LJ, but it just doesn't have the new-shiny that corporate can buy now to make it slick and immediately appealing.

This and other things have made me continue to think about my neocities website, but also aside from that I've been going even MORE low-tech and paying more attention to my commonplace book/zibaldone. I think once I've practiced enough I might do a write-up on these types of books on the neocities site along with some useful links because they are having a bit of a moment now, and maybe that moment should stay, because the internet is so friggin fickle.
grayestofghosts: a sketch of a man reading a paper (Default)
I had this bizarre idea to start a commonplace book and I went ahead and bought a notebook for it (because of course I did), and was thinking how a lot of things that would probably end up going in there are tumblr posts and other online things that are very likely to get lost into the aether the minute you look in the other direction, because as websites become "content mills" rather than anything worth viewing over and over again. I had the strange thought of making a website to archive these things worth reading, but that seems like it might take a lot of energy I don't have... and also, little reward.

Social media is insidious in that it creates an addictive pattern of immediate gratification but there's also, ah, the whole thing where you get no gratification or even response from anything you do. I remember my early experience on forums, being yelled at for wanting any sort of attention and being told that writing/art/whatever should be an entirely solitary pursuit and that I wanted any sort of response for anything was a sign that I was not cut out for it -- never mind that that's not true, has never been true, and weirdly, all this negative feedback on existing at all and being obnoxious did not stop me from creating anything, though it did stop me from posting. If I am doing something just for me, then writing it down in a little notebook for myself to enjoy is enough for me. A website is a lot of work with absolutely no one to look at it, it would not be for self-gratification. Which makes me, again, question, whether I should do this, or a lot of things, or sometimes anything at all.

I haven't written the novel in a few days. This is probably why I'm going crazy, I think.

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grayestofghosts: a sketch of a man reading a paper (Default)
Louis Chanina

December 2025

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