(Why) I moved to Bear
I just arrived at my new digital home: Bear, the minimalist blogging platform. I'm still sitting in between moving boxes that have yet to be unpacked, but I'm here (pants, sweats profusely).
My last place was a Wordpress page. A cookie cutter solution with lots of shiny features like fancy analytics, instant SEO optimisation and hundreds of templates to pick from. It's ironic that I browsed trough many many templates to find one that gave my page the minimalist look I was going for.
In December 2022 I wrote The AI Revolution is Here – Right At My Doorstep, shortly after the release of ChatGPT. Significantly, this turned out to be my last post until today. The appearance of Chat Daddy crushed what was left of my motivation to write – a motivation that was, admittedly, already quite fickle.
I had some good moments with the blog, but we never fully clicked. I had started it because, after leaving a career in journalism, I wanted to write again. But I couldn't shake off some of the things that I had grown accustomed to as a professional writer. Especially those two:
- You always write with an audience in mind
- You don't write anything that has been written before
I knew that, in theory, I was free of these constraints – but they were deeply ingrained in me. So I agonised a lot about my writings; who would read them and what the value would be for these people. I thought about how to distribute my writings via Social Media, SEO, an e-mail newsletter? All the while, I had no clear idea what I was even offering to my readers.
I think my cardinal mistake was expecting my writing to be of value only to others, not to myself. This gave everything a bad taste.
And this is what I still associate with my old place.
This is why I've relocated here, and I couldn't be more excited. As I unpack my digital boxes – each filled with ideas, particularly about how the rise of generative AI and the widespread enshittification of the internet could actually benefit blogs like this – I'm discovering more about what I want my new home to become. There's much to sort through in the next few days.