What even is bearblog?
I subscribe to the discovery feed of bearblog, I realised there was one after signing up, I was pretty pleased there was one as it seemed a good place to discover new voices - and it is! - and to get a pulse on the people that value simple and privacy preserving blogging like me, so it went among few dozens other feeds in my RSS reader.
All good right? Well yes, articles are mostly interesting, not too many that it becomes spam in my reader, and I found couple of blogs I started to follow already.
I am quickly realising there is another (dark?) side to this website, a community?, something self referential, I canāt quite put my finger on it yet, but Iām not sure if Iām up for that part too.
What do I mean?
Today one post (A) I got to see was about another post (B) on this platform that has criticised the content of the bearblogs, something along the line we are all boring as hell (guilty as charged!), well then the guy (B) crashed-out because of backlash (!?) and deleted the post and the blog (???), other people ( C) started commenting on it, and God only knows how many words have been said analysing this already (lots of platitudes for what I could read, first of all mine).
Itās fun, itās a bit like inside baseball, but what is going on? Is there lore at bearblog? Are there tiers of creators? An implicit editorial line?
Another one (or maybe two different post?) was about upvotes: people hiding the functionality, people upvoting people that donāt want upvotes, people feeling the pressure of not getting enough upvotes and writing to get themā¦ why!?
Count me out
I donāt care, itās fun to read, but Iām not gonna be a card carrying member of whatever that is.
Iām open to discussion, people can call out my bullshit, Iāll read it (if I find it) and might reply, but, and this is true, I write this for myself, I speak to you as you exist, but right now as I type this, it is just me and my screen, in one year it will still be just me and my screen, if you read it it will be just you and your screen at that time.
Spoilers: youāre reading āThe Old Man and the Screenā!
I donāt care about you I care about what you say
And really, why would it be any other way?
I donāt know you, I will never know you and I donāt want to know you, and Iām expecting the same from you.
What I want is to know what you say, what ideas you have, why you have them, what you find beautiful, what you find awful, what was that thought you had while sipping coffee and reading the news (remember the smell of newspapers & coffee? No?) - those are the things I care about, those are the things Iām looking for, and in return, as some blogging karma I let you poke around mine.
I guess all I got to say on this is: more writing, less drama, isnāt that what a (bear)blog is for, after all?
24 hours after the initial post: I find it hilarious that this post, out of all the amazing posts that have been published on this platform today, it is this post, that got to the top of the trending page - actual lmao
When I was speaking of āthere is another (dark?) side to this website, a community?, something self referentialā - this is it!
How else do you explain that the most interesting topic discussed on bearblog - according to bearblog trending algo - is bearblog!?
Iām new here, so maybe it has always been like this? In that case the trending RSS feed lost a lot of credit in my book, or maybe is just a trend and I managed to embed myself on the platform at the right (wrong) time. Time will tell. š¤·āāļø