Yet Another Meta Blog Post

It is commonly said that a picture is worth a thousands words, but anyone who's read a good novel might argue the opposite is true. Skillfully-crafted prose can describe feelings, experiences and environments more far better than a collection of vacation photographs. A photo doesn't tell us of a biting cold wind on a bright winter morning, or of the trepidation of finding oneself in an alien culture where few speak English, or of the reasoning and series of actions that led to the photo being taken. A photograph would say nothing about why I decided to wear a pretty white dress, and have my hair down, on a given day.

There is a reason why the terms 'enshittification', 'minimalism' and 'distraction-free editing' came into common usage lately - and why the term 'enshittification' was coined in the first place. Many of us want to craft long-form writing to express ideas, feelings, opinions and political analyses. Some of us yearn for a revival of the 'blogosphere', and for the Web to once again become a means to enrich our understanding of each other and the world.
The thing is that want conflicts with the need among corporations and their investors to monetise everything on the Web, to turn the Web into a de facto advertising platform, and to turn creators into producers. They do this through a process that came to be known as 'enshittification' - a platform getting bought up by a corporation is a sure omen of that. Enough people see this as a problem for the term to be coined.

Substack isn't the best example of this, but it's good enough to illustrate how most platforms and Web services are transformed, over time, to nudge people towards 'microblogging' and monetisation, and away from creative long-form writing.
I really liked Substack to begin with, because the concept was simple: An author publishes some opinion piece to his/her online publication, and the opinion piece is emailed to subscribers (paying and non-paying). Of course, we could do the exact same thing with WordPress, but what attracted me was the minimalist appearance of the platform. And the quality of analysis and opinion is still far better there than on most other platforms I can think of.
But, in recent years, Substack's developers added a Twitter-like thread thing, a suggested post feed that suggests posts based on 'The Algorithm', notes, etc. So began the notifications each time an author I subscribed to posted anything on that Twitter-like feed. It was becoming more like a 'social network'.
What I found particularly annoying, as a former Web developer, is the overlay: Instead of a home page that says anything about the character, style and content of a Substack publication, visitors are presented with a full-screen 'subscribe' overlay.

So, I spend more time on my main site these days. It means drafting things in Vim, configuring and running a static site generator, publishing to an old-school hosting plan (need to get round to sorting a VPS) and maintaining a classy domain. But the effort is worth it: My site is lightweight, immune to enshittification and free of monetisation-related cruft.

I came across this platform (Listed.to) the other evening, and I really like what I've seen so far: It's nice to have something that's totally private (and fully encrypted) for recording information thoughts, opinions and ideas, yet having the option of evolving some of that into blog posts and publishing them.
Listed.to and Standard Notes are quite under-rated as tools for privacy and freedom of expression. Is it scalable as a blogging system? We'll see.

Just an observation: For reasons I haven't explored - maybe because our brains need to be focussed on the content, without any distractions from ancillary features, in order to really appreciate it - there is an awareness that minimalism is important to the revival of blogging. This applies to the editor and the way the content is presented. Bearblog.dev, Neocities and Listed.to are all designed around that.