On Blogging

I have long had a fascination with blogging. Weblogs made up a large part of my first experiences of the web: browsing for endless hours, mostly hunting for free games, occasionally stumbling onto an interesting thought or a quirky website someone had built for no reason other than that they could. That was how I spent my childhood online, and it left an impression that never quite faded.

There is something deeply meaningful about that version of the internet — an interconnected web where you could wander from one person’s log to another’s, across countries and obsessions, with nothing but hyperlinks as your map. Nobody curated the route. The route was the destination.

That is not my experience of the web anymore, and judging by how often I hear the same lament, I am not alone. The easy conclusion is the resigned one: all good things must come to an end.

Or should they?

What the walled gardens won

One force, I feel, has driven this change more than any other: the enormous efficiency and capability gains that come from standardising content formats and hosting everything on a single platform. When every post is the same shape, a platform can index it, rank it, recommend it, and monetise it at a scale no federation of personal websites could dream of matching.

Walled gardens have an inherent advantage here. They collapse the cost of publishing to a text box and the cost of finding readers to an algorithm. The old web asked you to register a domain, wrangle hosting, and hope someone linked to you. The garden asks you to type. It is no mystery which offer most people accepted.

The garden traded the freedom of the open web for the convenience of the feed — and for most people, most of the time, that trade was worth it.

A settlement, not a law

But as with all technological change, I wonder whether that trade-off still holds today. The advantages that made platforms inevitable were answers to the constraints of a particular era — hosting was hard, discovery was harder, and standardisation was the only way to make either cheap. Constraints erode. The settlement built on them does not have to be permanent.

Here is the wager: if hosting can be taken care of in a way that is not burdensome to the user and does not limit their freedom, then the architecture of the open web — links, feeds, the plain addressability of a page anyone can point to — will take care of discovery and recommendation on its own. The web already knows how to route attention. It has just been out-competed at the on-ramp.

I am not a hundred percent sure this is true. But it is the kind of claim you cannot settle by arguing about it — only by building the experiment and watching what happens.

Dot Asterisk

Dot Asterisk is my attempt at running that experiment. Take hosting off people’s plates without taking their freedom with it, and see whether the old, decentralised web of weblogs can grow back — not as a museum piece, but as a living medium where interesting thoughts and quirky websites are once again something you stumble onto rather than something an algorithm serves you.

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. Either way it feels better than resignation. A small patch of the web where you answer to no platform and publish on your own terms.

A stead of liberty, if you will.