blog-bring-back-blogging

bring back blogging!

I loved following goth blogs in the early 2010s! even back then I didn’t like social media much lol, instead I liked spending my time on forums and reading what my favourite bloggers were up to.

I remember when one of the goth writers I followed got Twitter for the first time, and how a bunch of bloggers in general started getting social media accounts specifically for their sites. social media was a novelty at the time, a silly side thing: something that complemented the blog but definitely wasn’t the main platform. mostly, folks used socials to dump random thoughts and pics of their dinner between updates - something to keep their readers entertained while they were working on their next blog post.

i never ended up following any of my faves on socials, even when they started getting them. i was there for the personal website experience!

from between…I want to say around 2013 to 2017, things changed drastically. bloggers started microblogging on sm platforms more often, and updating their OG blogs less. posts began getting shorter. or started getting moved to instagram where posts were now in shorter caption form alongside a carousel. I think by around 2018 every blog I used to love had been abandoned. (with the exception of one or two that were randomly updated out of the blue during the pandemic in 2020 and then abandoned again.)

It’s still so weird to me. Social media went from being a complement to blogging to replacing it entirely, in a span of a handful of years. To replacing personal websites in general.

and maybe I’m just a crusty ol’ millenial at this point, but I think there was something magical about personal sites from the late 00s/early 2010s that is just completely missing from the sterile layouts and character limits of social media today.

there are probably so many reasons for why blogs felt so much better, but off the top of my head:

interesting backgrounds and headers that set a real vibe and made the whole site an experience

» instead of the same boring beige monotone layout that doesn’t feel like anything

posts being generally longer form

» more enjoyable to read and less overstimulating for this autistic girl, personally, than short form brainrot that’s over in literally 5 seconds

less anxiety and more of a sense of coming home when you visited a site

» the chance of finding horrible people in the comments of the latest post were smaller. Trolls existed, obvs - there were some truly epic fights in comment sections on bigger sites - but most people who put in the effort to comment actually liked that blog and so they generally said nice things.

feeling like you were entering another world, with interesting graphics and branching paths that you could spend a lot of time exploring

» and if you found a favourite blog like that, they were like a second internet home: a pleasant escape from irl that left you feeling inspired or calmer or even just a little better. I feel like these days we feel like we need to run into real life to escape the internet!

the intentionality behind deliberately choosing to visit a fave site

I think intentionality in our internet usage probably needs its own post! but I just know that deciding which specific site to visit and explore felt completely different from picking up your phone to restlessly scroll a giant app.

I’m definitely not saying that the 2010 internet was perfect. it’s not like online comparison is a new thing: feeling like crap about your body, your outfits, or your life in general after seeing a conventionally pretty blogger with online popularity was a problem back then, too. and on larger blogging platforms like LiveJournal and Xanga in the mid-to-late 00s, online drama was definitely still a thing.

but the creativity and self expression of the early/early-ish internet was greater, the overall vibe was calmer, and I miss all those things.

The Domesticated Goth: an alt girl blog from back in the day that’s still around, though not being actively updated

The Ultimate Goth Guide/Stripy Tights & Dark Delights (which doesn’t exist anymore, unfortunately): my absolute favourite place to hang out as an eager 18/19-year-old babybat.

one of the reasons I started this blog was so that I could make a whole world and experience online, the way the internet used to be!

and I also know that blogs really might not be for everybody.

I know that there are plenty of folks who might look at all the colours and sparkly gifs while reading this and go “this is awful, my eyes hurt, hard nope.”

but I also know that there are plenty of other folks who loved the old internet and miss blogs too.

so if that’s you, I hope you love being here! :) There will be a lot of talk about the 90s/2000s web, but also alt girl stuff, art I make, maybe an outfit post or two, music, and other fun stuff I dig up from around the internet. aka I want for this to truly be like an old-style blog!