Resolving the content-creation imperative

For a lot of us the “simple” prospect of filling in a web page with content presents an insurmountable writer’s block.

The decision to make a personal website is held back by the ‘content-creation imperative’; a nagging sense that a certain amount of stuff is required to justify your site’s existence. Stuff like blog posts, ‘the story of me’, personalized styling and so forth.

All very good stuff, but none of it is necessary for planting one’s roots in web-soil. On the contrary, this upfront labour becomes prohibitive and the project gets put off for another day.

For all their flaws, this is in large part why the mainstream social media applications have been so successful: All they ask for is a blurb. String just enough words together for a paragraph or two, and there’s your post, announcing your presence to the web and participating in the cultivation of The Commons.

Chatty Community Gardens

In the virtual world we think of digital gardens first and foremost as individual, personalized spaces. Yet in our physical cities the pro-social concept of Community Gardens is much beloved and far more accessible to the majority of city dwellers.

Muni BlogErlend Sogge Heggen

But the most pervasive among these platforms subject their users to another kind of content imperative: Always Be Posting, otherwise you’ll fade back into obscurity. And obscurity, in the eyes of the legacy platforms, is worse than death.

So what is an aspiring homesteader to do?

In recent years, a new kind of personal page format is trending. Popularized by Linktree, these minimal landing sites grew out of the constraints of web-hostile platforms like Instagram that would only allow a singular ‘link-in-bio’—why? because authentically unmitigated self-expression is an existential threat to their world of warped mirrors.

The solution was a wondrously webby hack: Use that one precious link to point at a bunch of other links! And so the 'linkspage' convention was born.

Yet in the age of feudalistic social media, most of our ‘personal links’ will still be pointing to fragments of our digital selves that are trapped inside walled-garden mega platforms. They’re significant parts of our identity nonetheless, thus hard to fully let go of.

Thankfully the radical act of collecting those links together in a space you own is enough to begin your journey of digital emancipation in earnest. With any effort to consolidate your identity, you are actively reclaiming ownership of your story online.

Map your multitudes and insist upon yourself!

Molly White (@molly.wiki)

I have more coming on this topic soon, but for now: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Your own domain pointing at your social media presence on a third-party platform is a step in the right direction. Backing up your posts on other platforms. Creating a website with a webhosting service. etc

Bluesky Social

Recipe for web agency

To recap:

• Step 1: Own your digital home
• Step 2: Resist the content-imperative (you are here)
• Step 3: Re-center your digital self

The third step, which is what a marketing-focused app like Linktree doesn’t concern itself with, is treating every single one of those links as an item in a TODO-list. And the Job to be Done for each link is simple:

Smash a hole through that walled garden and get your data back!

Data Defragmentation

‘Weird the data importer’ is our wedge into the data fortresses keeping our digital identities captive. PESOS - Recenter the publishing pipeline PESOS is an acronym for Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site. It’s a syndication model where publishing starts by posting to a 3rd party servi…

Muni BlogErlend Sogge Heggen

With this we're hoping we've made it a little clearer how Roomy and Weird are two sides of the same coin.

• Roomy is at the intersection of chat(sync) & forum(async)
• Weird is at the intersection of wiki(collective) & blog(individual)

They're essentially the same thing being built twice, for two different use cases that meet in the middle: community and identity.

The unifying force will be the Automerge-CRDT stack (our 'app engine') as well as a shared identity layer.

End-of-february we're releasing Weird v0.4.1 (bringing Link Embeds) along with a greatly updated website to clarify Weird’s value proposition as a web app for digital gardening.