why don't bloggers shitpost?

🎶 my body lies over the ocean

My body lies over the sea

I’m no good at astral projection

Please bring back my body to me 🎶

I was trying to think of something to write for a "proper" post, and it occurred to me that like ... I don't understand where that pressure comes from.

There's this sense somehow with blogging that you need to write Serious Posts, about Topics, that Provide Value.

Early on a lot of people had this anxiety about Cohost even; it resembled a blog platform too much and people felt like they had to live up to The Blog Standard, or do Cool CSS Crimes, and be generally High Effort, so there was a concerted effort on the part of the older early userbase to encourage folks not to take it so seriously, and just post whatever dumb nonsense they wanted.

Partly this was just to encourage more activity and make for a livelier site with a hopefully longer lifespan, but I think on a practical level, it helped to lower the sense of cultural pressure to perform, so that people would feel comfortable posting more organically.

Going forward, I want to try and do that with this blog, I think. I'll probably not go full memeposter, that's what Tumblr is for, but I want to get in the habit of writing more regularly, and that will hopefully have the knock-on effect of reminding people I exist.

I do have some "serious* projects in the works as well, in particular what I hope to become a new short fiction series that I'm super excited about, but since Mataroa doesn't have a tag system yet, I'll likely make subpages to keep track of new stories etc.

But sometimes I might just post dumb shower thoughts, random angry rants, or pictures of my cats and food, like I would anywhere else.

Let's make blogging more social again, and less ego driven. A place to be friends, not just Prospective Authors Seeking Book Deals.