I have to give myself some credit. When I started blogging on Substack over the summer, I wasn’t sure how to use it. As I wrote in my first post, I’ve been blogging since the Xanga era, but I haven’t figured out how to make it work for me in the present. I wrote four posts this year. That’s probably more than I’ve done on any long-form blogging platform since Xanga.

Now, here I am on WordPress. It is a platform I’ve flirted with for a very long time but have been admittedly intimidated by due to its complexity and my insecurities around web design. I’ve worked in the digital space my entire career, but am still learning. There are many things I feel I “should” know that I don’t. I “should” myself to death, as I’ve heard in therapy before.

The move to WordPress was probably inevitable, though it felt a little forced by Substack’s recent decision to monetize Nazi content on its platform. While I did not pay for any content through Substack or charge for access to mine, it felt wrong to continue patronizing a site that so brazenly threw up its hands at the idea of censoring Nazi voices. I understand others will not choose to switch platforms, and I do not blame them if they don’t. It’s complicated. Life is complicated.

“I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.”

-Hamish McKenzie, Substack Co-Founder

Not great! So, we move on.

However, another critical reason for my move to WordPress is its embrace of the social web through ActivityPub integration. The social web, or the “fediverse” as it is also known, is a social network comprising various servers connected through the ActivityPub protocol. I’m still learning a lot about it, but the recent downfall of Twitter and Meta’s embrace of the social web via Threads has made clear to me that this could be the real beginning of something big.

So, I will start writing here. Hopefully, more often. I wrote five posts in 2023, which should make 2024’s goal much more achievable. I’m setting a goal of 12 posts for the year. That’s just once a month! I hope to have much more to say than that, but let’s take it slow. In the meantime, subscribe!

See you all soon.

-Josh