It's hard to survive as an unshakeable rock

Yesterday I wrote (at somewhat foolish length) about some of the random shit that’s been clogging up my brain, of late. I wrote it before I even had a firm idea of where I would post it. I took a quick look at the various ATProto blog providers available at the moment. While Offprint looks like the most suited to me in the long term, it’s not actually out yet, and I didn’t want to wait. So, I went with Leaflet, mainly because that’s where Interlinked is located, and I figured that was as good a place to start as any. In fact, I reasoned, since I know I want to be able to move to Offprint down the line, and on ATProto, that should be easy enough, but that would give me a chance to test that theory out.

I have to say, coming back to the blog today, that Leaflet really is extremely limited. You post, and that’s it. There are no metrics, beyond comments or posts, and there’s very little visual change you can make to your blog. Not a massive fan. Sorry, Leaflet.

I thought I might try to give a bit more context about who I am, because that’ll inform what it is I’m looking for in a brand new internet world. Because we’re — all of us — looking for something quite specifically us.

Firstly, I’m in my mid 40’s, I’m a man, and I live in England. I’m also a writer, having self-published a few horror and science fiction novels, which you can find here . I also have a blog for my writing ‘career’ on Substack, which is shit, because I hate Substack, but I really like the functionality of it. That can be found here .

Before embarking on a spectacular career as a horror writer, I used to do a lot of music writing and led a website for a good five years or so called Demon Pigeon. It was very silly, and was a lot of fun, right up to the moment it wasn’t.

At the moment, I am coming to a pretty similar crossroads to the one I faced at the end of the Demon Pigeon days. I am intending to wrap up my open series, The Sunset Chronicles, release one more book in my vampire series, Darkness Rises, and then shutter the fiction business entirely.

As for what happens after that, well, I have some ideas. I might go back into music writing (the most concrete idea I have is for a quite specific piece of music writing, and there’s a book idea there, too) or I might start writing something else entirely, or I might just focus on designing. Oh, yeah, should probably have mentioned that — I taught myself cover design, and now do it for other people, too. Here’s some of my work, and I’m not just testing out whether you can put pictures in this blog, I promise.

Oh, look, you can!

So when I think about a future internet, here in THE ATMOSPHERE, it’s worth having the context that I am looking to tie together, potentially, quite disparate things. I’m also, potentially, looking to find a way to scale up an online creative presence, hopefully in a way that could provide some kind of income.

The other thing to note is that I absolutely fucking hate generative AI. One of the key things that attracts me to ATProto is the portability, and that’s going to be key, I think. If some social media platform starts to cram a shitoad of AI slop into your feed, or tries to force AI ‘features’ down your throat, you should be able to just tell them to fuck off, and take your business elsewhere. But this is also why I’m 100% not about to go to Chat GPT and ask it to explain coding, GitHub, nodes and all that for me. I refuse.

So let’s see how that goes. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to try to parse out exactly where the ecosystem is for me, in terms of the things I want to be able to do. Then we’ll try and take a look at just how easy it is to start doing this shit, without any kind of IT skills.

Lastly, I might start dropping links at the end of these for pieces I’ve read that made me think deeper about all this, and where better to start with this piece by Henry (from online). I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions, which fall firmly into the ‘we all need to learn how to build our own code’ ethos, but I agree with everything else. Also, it’s beautifully written and gorgeous to look at.

A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online

How to win the war for the soul of the internet, and build the Web We Want.

As always, do leave a comment, or hit me up on Bluesky, or come chase me down the street when I'm on a dog walk if you have any thoughts, recommendations, or anything else you want to share.