Moin!

Hey there! Lately, I have been reading more and more about visions of what the internet could be. Learning about projects like indieweb, ActivityPub (the protocol behind Mastodon, Lemmy or Pixelfed) and seeing individuals like Molly White pointing out web problems and sketching out possible alternatives really got me hyped about this idea of an internet used for open and independent communication between individuals. The last years, I have been disappointed by many of the online platforms I have been using (Reddit/Twitter/Github/Instagram/Youtube, the list goes on).

Most proprietary services just don’t feel right to me anymore. So many websites take ages to load, are full of shitty advertisments, pop-ups, tracking and someone decided that autoplaying videos is somehow acceptable now?! What the hell is up with that, by the way?

Having your own blog and interacting with others using open and decentralized protocols seems like a stark contrast. And since this is how the internet (apparently) used to work before the rise of the big internet platforms, there is already some great tech for this. I recently discovered RSS — don’t blame me, I have hardly seen it being discussed anymore — and it seems like such an elegant solution to the problem of “show me all the things I want to read”. Without anyone in between deciding what you read and potentially abusing this power.

Every now and then, I stumble over random people’s blogs. Often I’m encountering them from a computer science (often computer graphics) angle but am then even more interested finding all sorts of random things on their personal web pages: Sketches, short stories, old poems, created music, opinions about games or shows I’m passionate about, beautiful small picture albums, I’ve even come across a personal website of someone just gathering their favorite jokes. This feels like the purest and best spirit of the internet to me: Allowing people to freely express themselves, be themselves. Just for others to enjoy and possibly connect.

All these considerations and inspiration from other blogs I like to read has pushed me to start my own little blog. I added some older posts I wrote somewhere else or just locally to begin with!