It never disappeared, damn it. Just demand it’s PACKAGED right.

I have seen only this morning the “Bring Back personal blogging” post by Monique Judge at The Verge, which says:

• in the days of “personal weblogs or “blogs” [things] were really simple”
• If you “were a little more adventurous, you could purchase an actual domain name”
• “discussions happened in the comments section of said blogs”
• “The demise of Twitter… has made me nostalgic for the personal blogging days” “with these social media platforms… our popularity today could very well be destroyed and disappear from the internet tomorrow, and then what?"
• “Take the power back by building blogs”
• “Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web”

Posts like that make me scream. Seriously

NOT at Monique Judge, of course! Nothing personal here, seriously. But posts like that still turn me into Howard Beale:

After reading any post like that, I just want to scream that “those days” were NEVER gone (*). They are just ignored!

I just want to scream that I can’t stand that in 2023 there still have to be reminders like “If one of these companies decided to shut down their service permanently, there would be nothing we could do about it."

Because that is the same damn thing everybody has already said, in indefensible shock, every other damned time such shutdowns already happened: MySpace, GeoCities (toldya), Tumblr (toldya), Yahoo Groups (toldya), Twitter… need I to continue?

Calling out developers, journalists and other experts

The fact that anything placed into somebody else’s “platform” may disappear in any moment has always been patethically obvious.

But almost nobody says that two big reasons why a REAL, as in “really usable NOW” alternative has not happened yet are:

• developers who’ve always snobbed simple solutions, to chase perfections (Diaspora, FreedomBox, Sandstorm, ScuttleButt…) that nobody else would use, thus actively helping Facebook to triple its users in a decade
• journalists and experts who did exactly the same by granting a decade of space and credibility, instead of bursts of laughs, to:
• USELESS proposals like “breaking up facebook”, “data portability” or irrelevant versions of “data ownership”
• DANGEROUS proposals like “let’s governments replace corporations”, “data as money” or “data unions”

(and don’t get me started with the abandonment of RSS and all the “experts” saying with a straight face that “RSS died when Google killed Reader”, instead of shaming all the websites that hide it)

“Take the power back by building blogs”? Sure. But in the right way

“Take the power back by building blogs” and “Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web” is what I’ve proposed for literally TEN YEARS (and one month) now.

It was January 2013 when I shouted as loud as I could that “The alternatives to Apple, Facebook & C already exist. Shall we package them?"

Since then, I’ve expanded the same concepts as often as possible:

You may click here to see those thumbnails, or here, to read them all, but the quickest way to understand what I have been proposing for a decade are this post and these slides.

In case you’re wondering why I haven’t gone and just done that “packaging” myself, the answer is embarrassingly simple: pay me (and others) and I will, I can’t do it for free”. More on that, and on my “attitude” towards developers is here.

If I sound like a broken record, it’s not my fault

It’s the fault of whoever has already wasted ten years, in spite of what Einstein probably NEVER said,

by sticking to uselessly complicated schemes, or schemes that could never work in the first place. It’s time to try something ELSE, for a change. Something that MAY be ACTUALLY feasible soon enough, and scalable.

If Elon Musk could waste at least 44 (more or less real) billion dollars to do what he did to Twitter…

Can it really be that there is no other billionaire, foundation, whatever… with a twenty thousandth or so of that money to spare on giving perclouds a REAL try?

If you want ME to do that, give that money to me. Or just go ahead and do it yourself, I’d be happy anyway. See below.

Oh, and since almost nobody will see this…

What I really care about is that enough people start engaging in enough discussions around this to make serious percloud trials happen, regardless of who is involved.

But this will never happen, unless posts like this DO get right before the eyes of many thousands of people, possibly millions. Ignore me, no problem, but make this post viral.

Just “liking” this won’t do, considering how social media shadowban content. Mailing lists, LinkedIn, tweets, toots, FB walls, pages, groups… Actively, explicitly share this everywhere you can, as much as possible, as often as possible.

Because I just can’t take this anymore. Make it unnecessary to make any more calls to “Bring Back personal blogging”:

(*) This blog has been online non-stop for almost seventeen years now, always keeping the same links for each post. If it has no comment section, it’s because stuff like Disqus would have privacy issue, and nobody has made adequate self-hosted comment systems for Hugo yet_