About This Blog (or Why Am I Doing This?)

Confession: I have not been a good internet citizen.

I have received immeasurable value from the internet over my life. It’s where I learned countless things, formed dozens of friendships, and earned my living for decades.

If I’m honest with myself, only in rare cases have I given back. I think that I have frequently justified this as humbleness. Do I really have ideas or knowledge that are worth people’s time? In reality, my lack of participation was selfish - the upside seemed pretty minimal compared to the risk to my ego and mental health.

It has also gotten a lot scarier to participate in.

I think it was 1994 when I first discovered the internet (shout-out to widomaker.com which incredibly still exists). It was mostly nerds and college kids back then. There was a real spirit of exploration and careful curation of the commons.

Since then, I’ve watched much of it devolve into the self-indulgent privacy nightmare that it is today.

But some corners of the new internet have given me a lot of hope. The Fediverse, the self-hosted movement, etc., feel a lot like those early days. They’re not yet full of people trying to build their personal brands or hype their course or products (or if they are, the platforms give me the tools to avoid them). That’s because they’re small and full of nerds like us. Honestly, I hope they stay that way. To me, they have already “won” in that we’ve created a corner of the internet that can be ours again.

I want to see them succeed, and for that to happen they need people committed to keeping them kind, safe and interesting places. They need people to support them with thoughtful, human-made content and technical expertise.

So that’s why I’m here and why I’m doing this. I’m doing my best to join the many kind stewards of this medium that has given so much to me.

This site has no tracking, no ads, no affiliate links, and no sponsored content.

All of the writing here is my own unless explicitly described otherwise. I sometimes use an LLM for spelling and grammar checks (see prompt) and in the cases it catches an error I manually apply the change.

There are also no comments, but please feel free to email your thoughts, feedback, and corrections (hi@til.io).

If you are open to me sharing those, thoughts, please mention that in the email, and I’ll add your comments to the relevant post.