Thanks, Herman.
I’ve been at this for a while now, and I think it’s going reasonably well. I like Bear as a blogging platform because it hasn’t forgotten that the most essential part of a blog is content—the words. I am not sharing memes, pictures of food, or passing on something your third cousin posted about weather-control machines.
A blogging platform worth using disposes of the trappings of social media and is a place to write. Social media is the shallowest of pools, and I would argue that pool has been thoroughly polluted. Whenever I see an author whose entire web presence is on Facebook or the like, I cringe. They’ve given up on even offering something worthwhile to the world.
I’m interested in sharing thoughts. Not ideas, because ideas are simply fragments of thoughts. I mean fully-fledged thoughts that require a reader to follow along for a couple of hundred words as that thought is fully expressed. A meme is all about provoking a reaction. A tweet is a parody of a blog post. A TikTok video is whatever the hell they’re supposed to be.
Those things don’t require thought, so they don’t provoke thoughts. No one watches a thirty-second video and has an epiphany about life, work, or anything. They’re amused for half a minute, and they move on. I doubt they’ll even remember what they saw in an hour.
So, thank you, Herman, for remembering what blogging is all about.