lostinheadspace

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[music: modest by default : RAW PRACTICES VOL. I (حساس)]

Writing has always been hard for me.

My illustrious decade-long Reddit career might seem like a great counterexample to thrust in my face. I have posted over 1,200 comments since 2012, only stopping when they killed the API in mid-2023. Could writing have been that hard? I was ostensibly only posting relatively high quality text - I tried really hard to only interact with things that were worth my time, and must have not posted something like 20% of comments I drafted.

But I insist on restating, I struggle to write. Comments on Reddit were reactions, discussions, easy. Writing introspectively, without oversharing, that's hard.

During the exodus of power users from that old site, we scattered across the internet in search of what, for a lot of us, would be our new online home. I've tentatively made the Fediverse my home, and while the growing pains are there (and there are many), I was really looking for a place to write. The Lemmy side of things is where I spend most of my time, but I wanted a proper blog. I'd come to miss the mythical old internet of my childhood, which I had barely explored, and I thought it was finally time. I clicked through all the IndieWeb documentation, and got to brainstorming.

For like two hours.

I still have those IndieWeb documentation tabs open. I resent them, as they sit next to all of my other tabs (I disable my tabs - I'm not wasting electricity on year-old tabs, no worries!). I resent them like I resent so many of my (unloaded) browser tabs, every group of which are a digital husk of an idea that I got really excited about for less than the duration of an evening.

I use Firefox, I use a tab manager. I can, with certainty, report that I have 1550 tabs open across 23 windows. Truly, I am living my online life to the fullest. Do any of these tabs elicit anything I've wanted to feel again from the internet back in the day?

Today I give up on the IndieWeb project. Forking over 4 bucks for a domain and another handful for hosting, and sitting down and finally learning about the way the web works - that's been tabled, indefinitely, to be regretted in the future. Today I give in. Mataroa seems about as good as a platform can get for free by being lazy. I hate ads, I hate intrusive web design, I hate everything that was ever published to the internet after the clock struck midnight on December 31st, 2009. If I ever make my own thing, I am exporting this whole blog there. The Mataroa people respect me enough to offer the option, and I respect them enough to threaten them with using it on the first day. I really only know about this platform because of the incredible and cathartic masterpiece of slam blogging that is I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. I will cherish that blog post like it is a memorable song, I will share it to everyone willing and unwilling to read it.

I have also tried my hand at writing in a personal journal, which I've been able to reliably do at the rate of one post per year. Paper journaling never worked for me, and the app journals I liked, while polished and genuinely lovely to use, just didn't grab me enough to keep writing.

Signing up to this platform did give me the old-internet equivalent to butterflies in your stomach you when signing up to some site, back when that meant something. I carefully considered what tone I wanted my username to set. I think it must be years since I did something other than mash a burner pseudonym and let Firefox fill in my low-priority info for a one-off sign-up. Everything asks you to sign up now. This time I felt a little more weight behind it.

I have thoughts. I will be writing about them.

There's something depressing about how pervasive LLMs have gotten. I venture out on the mainstream platforms - Facebook, Instagram, even the Bird App, and I'm amazed by the sheer volume of bot spam. I'm not the first one to lament how it's rusting out the internet, and certainly not the first to admit that the energy cost of running all this high-overhead computational load is fucking terrifying.

But in the last few months, at my office job, I was asked by an unqualified manager if something I'd written was generated by ChatGPT and that I should change it. And that wasn't only deeply insulting, it was the start of a spiral of thoughts:

  1. This garbage makes everyone who writes passable English a suspect for trying to pass an LLM's output as their own (I am from and live in a country where English is used widely in business, but is not the native language - I can humbly say I am at least above average with my English writing where I am).

  2. Most of my English has been learned from reading and consuming media. My English, while syntactically sound, while paced in what I hope would be an interesting voice, is still, to some level, a little mechanical. Do I just naturally talk like a robot?

  3. Is this overpaid fuckhead just using ChatGPT to do his job and pulling an accusation-as-admission?

  4. He is. I really need to exit corporate and code from a cabin in the hills. Like god and my ancestors would have wanted.

I had always assumed that my Reddit comment writing was at least keeping my writing sharp. When I signed up to Lemmy two months ago, I found much more hesitation with writing comments. I felt like there was more of a hump to overcome. And worse, the ideas weren't flowing. I had to think of how to structure ideas, I was second guessing how I wrote a lot of things, and when I reread many of my comments before posting, I found the quality of writing to be just a little lacking.

Maybe I am rusty. Maybe this blog will be a factor in me digging myself back out of the writing hole. Maybe more than one hole.