Why I Started Writing Here

I wrote on social media for years, until one day I began to see that what I had written was not really mine. Who gets to see it is not for me to decide. Going back to find my own work is still hard. This is not a technical matter — it is exactly the same thing I wrote about open source: the ability to determine your own fate.

For years I stopped putting things on this website and went off to write on social media instead (which had nothing to do with likes or being well known, mind you — I never opened it to the public, so it was people who actually know each other reading it, Haha!). But I know now what I ought to be doing properly. When you cannot find what you wrote (not easily, anyway), when pulling your own thinking together is a struggle, and when it starts to feel like you are speaking in the wrong place — it is time to get yourself back into a system again.

We think we own it. We are actually renting.

On those platforms we own nothing at all. Who gets to see what we write — they decide. When it surfaces — they decide. The day they change the rules midway, we take it. The day they shut the thing down, our whole pile goes with it.

Sound familiar ??? This is exactly the same as closed software: you pay and you still do not own it, you wait for them to build the feature, you accept terms that change midway, you pray they do not discontinue it. I wrote about this in earnest in the context of enterprise software — and then one day it hit me: hold on … I do this myself, every single day.

They are not in the wrong. But they are not doing it for us either.

To be fair, these platforms are doing nothing wrong. They are running their business, and their business is selling readers’ attention — not preserving my thinking. Those two were never the same thing to begin with.

The problem is that a great many people assume they are.

A thought you have not written down is a thought you have not checked

The second reason is more personal. While a thought is still in your head, it all looks fine. It is only once you start writing that you find out which parts you had not actually thought through, and which parts you picked up from someone else and repeated without ever checking once.

So this is not meant to be a place for announcing what I know. It is a space I use to sharpen my thinking, and to share it so I give myself the chance to get some feedback from other people. If anyone reads it and gets something out of it, that is profit.

The tools have got cheap enough that there is barely an excuse left … What remains is one thing only: if you want a place of your own, you have to build it yourself.