My fellow Netizens!
I started this blog to share my thoughts about TTRPGs with you, dear reader. I could have posted about my hobby through one of the many free-to-use platforms, but I explicitly decided against doing so. Those platforms would offer you and me a truly rotten deal: skip payment for services in exchange for being locked into a platform where we are tracked, profiled, and commodified. I refuse to take that deal. And if you are reading this, I have refused that deal on your behalf. I may as well explain myself.
I believe in an open Internet where we all contribute to this incredible shared intellectual and social resource. My blog may as well be a dust mote on the scale of the Internet, but it is my creation, and I will make it according to my principles. My words come to you truly free. When you visit my blog, you see no ads. You are not tracked. No one skims another datapoint of engagement into their profile of you. No one is going to show you an ad for some god-awful t-shirt with d20s on it because you visited GrayOoze.com.
Purveyors of social media platforms corral Internet users in order to sell user engagement with a platform for more than the cost of running said platform. They changed the Internet from an era of equal Netizens to one of tech barons lording over their serfs, tied not to land, but to platform. If this bothers you, good news! That is not the way it has to be. The Internet is a free channel. No one owns TCP/IP, TLS, or HTML.
Blogging on my own terms is easy. I can pay a small fee for a VM in a datacenter or even host my own. That VM runs the open-source publishing platform WordPress. I don’t have to accept a platform’s rotten deal; I control my own platform. Really. If I want to change which hosting service I use, I download all my data, upload it to a new WordPress server, and redirect the DNS. Would Facebook let me do the same?
As a reader, you get a better deal too. In addition to not being tracked when you visit GrayOoze.com, you have more freedom in how you read my work. Want to aggregate my blog with others you follow? No problem. Grab the RSS feed and get my posts in an open and portable format to read in whatever way and with whatever application you desire. Do you think Reddit would give you that deal?
If I’ve inspired you to make your own blog, please go do it. It only took me a couple hours to set up everything, including certificates for HTTPS. You’ll be making a better deal for yourself and your readers. If you have a blog, tell me about it on the ad-free, algorithm-free, open-source microblogging platform Mastodon @[email protected]. I’d like to check it out.
Yours in Solidarity,
Alex Gray
