The Male Hysteric

—
 

I feel like this post is necessary as someone who has tried to prod people into using other platforms besides tumblr and twitter (these issues are also evident on instagram and TikTok, etc., though I’m not on those platforms) who don’t seem to understand the benefits of having a long-form, "traditional" blog. A lot of the responses I get about why people don’t use Dreamwidth is because "no one uses it", as in there’s not enough users to make a thriving community for fandom content, which pushes people to use more popular microblogging platforms. While that’s a huge draw for most people here, I'm not asking people to consider Dreamwidth or other blogging sites as a replacement for tumblr. While traditional blog communities have supported fandoms, but that’s not what they’re for. 

 

A huge issue with microblogging sites that long form blogs do not have, is that they lack memory. They purposefully make posts further and further back in time harder and harder to access, especially if they’re not popular. The tagging systems on these sites are barely functional and there’s no reason to fix them because they work that way for a reason — and that reason is that for microblogging platforms, users posts, the “content”, IS their product, and users need to keep churning out more and newer product to fuel the site's profitability. It’s impossible to keep attention on Instagram if you’re not posting every day. Recent Twitter posts are thrown on random user’s timelines due to “engagement”. Tumblr’s search function is infamously useless. This is not a problem for the website itself but it creates a huge issue for users in destroying memory. It forces users to have the same discussions and arguments over and over again because points made in previous iterations become lost as they’re impossible to find, or if found, posts are misused because the context they were written in has been lost. This is a HUGE problem with social Justice and any kind of social organizing. For example, a user today posted a pink triangle on Twitter as a proposal for the queer community to use it again as a symbol to remind everyone what happened to queer people when fascists came into power — and a bunch of young queer people were asking them what it meant. For those who don’t know, the pink triangle is a traditional symbol of queer liberation because the Nazis used it to identify “homosexual” prisoners in concentration camps, and people in the camps with pink triangles were not freed even when the camps were liberated because they were still considered by the allies to have committed crimes and deserving of imprisonment. While it was depressing that younger queer people didn’t know this, it’s not their fault, or not entirely. Back when I was younger, there wasn't a lot of mainstream queer information, but there were some guides, essentially glossaries of queer terms on homemade static websites and any of these worth their salt would absolutely have information on the pink triangle symbol. Where would young queers get this sort of information? The first time I learned about it was Shoah education through Jewish sources — certainly not through secular school, and it's not in use much even in queer spaces so you wouldn't know it unless you had been introduced to it specifically. There are wikis for queer terms that young queers edit, sure, but given the nature of wikis and the nature of online queer culture the more commonplace a term is, the more contested it becomes, so information about pink triangles probably fell by the wayside. Possibly it wasn’t communicated by older queers who didn’t understand the newfangled wikis, either, and this is discounting any purposeful disconnection of queer liberation from the literal Holocaust, whatever the intent.

 

Now I brought up old-school static pages as the old-fashioned solution to this problem, but have their own issues. Aside from the webmaster being positioned as the One Source of Truth, they require little maintenance so it’s easy for them to become outdated, and they don’t necessarily have time stamps unless the webmaster puts one there. And this doesn’t count the possibility of the website suddenly disappearing if the user forgets to pay the web hosting service or a free one goes under without little warning like geocities. Websites take some knowledge to set up, or they take money, often both, but in the end you at least had an easy link to answers to discussions that had already been had a million times before. Do you remember how often on twitter or tumblr you’ve wanted to say “Google is free” when you're annoyed by simple questions, but then realize with horror that Google curates biased hits from algorithms based on the user’s previous searches, possibly poisoning it for any answers on controversial issues? What if instead you could just post the same link to your own page with information and relevant links every time the argument comes up? It’s not going to bring about world peace but it’s at least something, right? 

 

But I’m not even talking about static pages as a solution to repeating discussion ad nauseum, I’m talking about blogs. A long-form blog is a midpoint between a personal website and a microblog, where you can post your opinions, research, and what you’ve gleaned from a discussion in one entry that’s linkable, editable, and can be commented on by other users with some effort on their part, if they care to do so, and you can moderate these comments as well. You can post your information quickly, and the blog creates static links to these pages that can be pasted elsewhere, you can create your own tags that actually work, the site can be easily navigated chronologically over long periods of time, and they’re not nearly as much of a bother to set up as a personal site. You have way more control over your content and who interacts with it, and it won’t escape into the larger ecosystem of social media except by outside links because that’s simply not how traditional blogs work. 

 

I don’t think microbloggers should give up on microblogging sites BUT I do think maybe, if you post anything longer than a paragraph or two, you should think about preserving your essays — and yes, they’re essays — on a site you have more control over that’s made to hold essays, like a long-form traditional blog, so they don’t get eaten by a website that only values newness and popularity.

 

Anyway, some recommendations of blogging sites:

 

-Dreamwidth.org: a LiveJournal fork, has more community options than many on here and is ad-free even for non-paying users. Compared to many blogging sites it’s simple to use but offers limited customization and looks very retro at this point. The major problems come with its major strengths — as an LJ fork many of its features are for building communities but there are so few active users that it’s difficult to use for that specifically. Also, due to its content policy, it does not have and won’t  make a mobile app, which is how most  users engage with social media these days. However its mobile site is quite functional. It won’t make a monetizable, marketable blog but it’s a great place if you just need to archive your thoughts online.

 

-Wordpress: this is a pretty diverse option, in there’s wordpress.com which is free blogging site if you’re satisfied with a subdomain, or  you can use the Wordpress platform from Wordpress.org which is free BUT you have to pay for hosting. Without paying, wordpress.com is ad-supported. If you do want a full-featured monetizable marketable blog, Wordpress is how you would do it, which is not what I was discussing on this post but if that’s what you want, more power to you 

 

-Blogger: I haven't used this platform for many years but it was useable when I did. This is another ad-supported free blog with limited features, with the bonus that it can be monetizable. This normally wouldn’t be a problem except that it’s owned by Google and attached to your Google account, so proceed with caution if you’re worried about that.

 

-Medium: You may not think of Medium as a blogging platform but that's essentially what it is, with the posts in the style of articles than personal journal entries. The major problem with it is that it’s about gaining an audience, but they have their own monetization scheme, and because people who want an audience tend to want money as well, people tend to move on from it once they acquire one. However if your posts are mostly about being informative and want to be able to repost them in the form of articles this may be a good option. 

 

If you don’t want to run another friggin blog:

 

-You can just straight up make your own website. Website builders like Wix are an option but if you just want to make static pages like the ones I mentioned earlier, can I interest you in Neocities.org? It’s free, ad-free space for static pages, though you need to pay if you want your own domain name. You could even pair this with a static site generator like Pelican if you want a blog-like functionality (dated entries on a page, but no ability to comment), but be warned this route is not for the faint of heart and will take a significant amount of time, especially if you’re not familiar with HTML and CSS and probably some JavaScript, and for Pelican how to use a terminal and markdown. I wouldn’t recommend this unless you already have an interest in “retro” site-building and have a specific purpose.

 

-Are you mostly doing fandom or fiction analysis? Believe it or not, if your fanwork can be considered a "noncommercial, non-ephemeral fanwork", it can be posted on Ao3 per their submission policy, even if it's not strictly fanfiction.

 

-If you’re really married to tumblr, you can make static tumblr pages for any material you want to have its own page on your tumblr so it can be referenced but not commented upon. A lot of people use these to make “about” pages, but they can also be used for glossaries, reference pages, collections of links, etc.