Hello (again)
A story about the decline and revival of my interest for the internet and my place inside of it.
I've been on the Internet for half my life now – in retrospect, my enthusiasm for it has waned quite a bit over the years.
During my training as an IT specialist (german: Fachinformatiker), the Internet became almost freely accessible to me: at home, connecting to the Internet was expensive (~30 ct/minute). At work, the Internet was twice as fast thanks to ISDN channel bundling, free, and since I had the keys to the office and lived just five minutes away, always available.
In that time, I was very active online: I was engaged in public chat rooms, had my own content-rich website with a blog [1], a forum, a section of my poems and MIDI compositions, and a live webcam so that my parents (who had emigrated to the Caribbean at the time) could see me from time to time, and and and… it was exciting!
When my mom passed away in 2005, I moved to a bigger city, started a course of study that had nothing whatsoever to do with development and became a freelance web developer as a side-job which I turned into a full one after I had to abandon my studies.
I lost the drive to create content myself up until I deleted my website and canceled the domain [2]. Facebook and Twitter entered the scene, and I became addicted to news and devoured the content of others without creating content myself.
Many times I thought about and even began restarting a blog, but being a developer who wasn't satisfied with any existing offering, I focused too much on the tech stack each time and never got past a "hello, I'm back" entry before giving up again – especially since I didn't think I had anything relevant to contribute.
Still, my frustration with and addiction to Twitter and Instagram grew with time. It was Matthias Ott with his tweets about the Indie Web and the Fediverse on Twitter who got me motivated to look into breaking away from the algorithm-driven networking platforms, and Per Axbom's "Bye, bye algorithm" and "Indieweb and self-hosting my own space"[3] that led me to actually doing it.
Long story short: Hello, I'm back! I'm still not sure if I have really something relevant to say, but I'll do it anyway 💪.
I recently found an archive of my blog back then, and calling it cringeworthy would be an understatement 😅. It was nonetheless very rewarding, and I met a lot of interesting people with it, among them two girl friends. ↩︎
My web presence must have been quite popular or why was my domain taken over by an NSFW provider shortly after? ↩︎
Per sums it up better than I ever could. ↩︎