So, Why a Blog?

Hi, my name is Yelle and this is my little space on the internet! It’s likely that if you’ve landed here somehow that you already know who I am in some capacity, but perhaps it’s important that I start with why I wanted to create a blog.

No Algorithm, No Pressure

First, on a personal blog, there are no algorithms, your presence isn’t decided on the whim of some multi-millionaire tech bro. Regardless of how much I claimed I was posting or sharing just for myself, I would always check repeatedly who had seen a tweet, who had liked a post. That little notification of a comment was a little dopamine boost that I checked as soon as it rolled across the top of my screen. I stressed about making friends in fandom spaces, how work that I enjoyed writing and creating would be received by others in the space. Wondering if the threadfic I was writing would roll across the timeline of an author whose work I admired.

Not only that, it was very hard for me to not subconsciously compare myself to others. There’s a reason I gave up Instagram almost 5 years ago, and that decision was majorly influenced by the stress comparison caused me. Yes, we all know that Instagram and Facebook are reels of another person’s highlights (whether the highest highs or the lowest lows), don’t compare your everyday life to someone’s highlights, we’ve all heard it 1000 times before. But that doesn’t change the fact that fixing that thought, that knee jerk reaction to compare, is intentional emotional work. It doesn’t change immediately. It’s a constant rewriting of internal dialogue that’s exhausting. So why not just remove the trigger? At the end of the day, my happiness is no longer so influenced by something completely outside of my control.

So Much Room for Activities! (Hobbies)

Another reason to have my own blog is that I have a lot of hobbies😅I have a lot of interests, a lot of things I like to think about, and sometimes there’s no pattern of what I’m into at the time. I’ve had many, many themed tumblrs and twitter accounts, I’ve set up separate Instagrams for specific interests and carefully curated what the grid looks like on them. I’ve thought of making a booktok, a simstagram, let’s not talk about the supernatural fanblog from 2013 that has been collecting dust for twelve years now. All these pieces of me are scattered to the corners of the internet and it’s a bit sad that I don’t have one cohesive place where I can look back and see how my interests have changed over the years. I hope that my blog can be that space going forward, where there’s no pressure to produce enough “content” to have a full-fledged, separate space, but there’s also no pressure to have a cohesive, curated online presence.

Divesting From the Tech Oligarchy

And lastly, screw the multimillionaire tech bros. Honestly and truly. In an age where we are increasingly losing the ability to truly own anything digitally (I spent quite a bit of time this year figuring out how to backup my Amazon ebook collection), it’s important to have a space that is solely for me. My writing, interests, photos, don’t belong to the social media platform where I upload them, they’re not subject to removal in an increasingly sanitized digital world. I don’t have to censor myself with nonsense like grape, say gex, or pew pew when I want to talk about important topics. Anything I share isn’t being fed into Grok on Twitter. I have space to be authentically me without worrying that I’m going to be censored or if anything I share is going to be scraped and fed to an AI. I don’t want to make the tech bros more money.

So, what about social media?

What does it mean for my socials? I’m not sure yet. It’s hard to deny that social media is the easiest way to keep up with a vast network of people. Sometimes it is fun to scroll mindlessly through a tag for a new hobby, or to check in on a person I haven’t talked to in years. But in the grand scheme of things, I miss that far less than I enjoy not being on social media. 

This does mean that I’m more intentional about how I spend my time. I can’t ~vibe~ participate vicariously in other hobby pages by looking at all their content and suddenly it’s too late to actually do the hobby I was excited about doing. More often than not, I have to reach out to people who are important to me, via text message or something else old school, because I don’t get those moments of micro-connection like liking a post or sending a quick comment.

Keeping Up With Fandom

One aspect of my life that has been difficult to keep up with now that I’m off of social media is how to keep up with fandom and other media interests. Twitter, Tumblr and Tiktok are still the dominant places to engage in fandom, and it’s hard to even know where/how to engage with fandom without it. Many fanartists, writers, voice actors, etc. only have a social media presence and nowhere else to keep up with them. I’m noodling on a post about how to keep up with fandom without being on social media, but I have to admit that I haven’t found the perfect potion to solve that problem yet.

Overall, I don’t regret taking a step back from social media because in the grand scheme of things, I am much happier. I love having my little digital garden here (for those who haven’t heard the term, a digital garden is basically an always-evolving space on the internet where one shares their thoughts, knowledge and ideas). It’d be awesome if people dropped in every now and then to this space to see what’s happening.

--Yelle💜