Writing has always been a lonely endeavour and there is no changing that

“I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘Do blogs need to be so lonely?’ asked Jay Hoffman on his website a couple of days ago. In a thought-provoking essay he explores the history of collaborative blogging as a means of overcoming the loneliness of running a blog. ‘Sometimes,’ says Jay, ‘I feel like I’m shouting into the void.’ I have felt this way myself and occasionally, although much less frequently, continue to feel this way to this day. However, I do not think collaborative blogging is the only solution to this; rather it is improved communication through a wholly independent protocol, something towards which the IndieWeb is already working.

It is perhaps because I have always seen writing, and by extension blogging, as a solitary hobby that I never noticed any loneliness shadowing it. On the contrary, because I have always seen my website as an incredibly personal space—one that, to a great extent, stands for who I am—I have never entertained the idea of anyone sharing this with me. However, in the manner that Jay describes, I already run what might be considered a collaborative blog in the form of Physics Capsule where my old friend and I write occasionally on all things physics. Besides a topical identity and basic organisation nothing restricts how we publish there.

On this website the closest I have come to collaborating in any sense is when I allowed guest blogging. (Back in the ’00s guest blogging was all the rage.) Those entries no longer exist, having been permanently archived along with hundreds of my own posts over the years.

I like to think of this as a loneliness that is procedural, and I do not really identify with it. Collaborative blogging would solve this no doubt but I find it hard to convince myself this is an immediate problem that needs solving. In my opinion what is more immediate—and what Jay identifies as well—is the loneliness you feel after you publish. Is anybody reading this? Am I shouting into the void? Until I became an active participant on the IndieWeb this was a routine feeling I had simply come to terms with. Lately, though, things have been a bit different. While analytics can help in many ways1 there is no real connection with my readers. Collaborative blogging may solve that by capitalising on the readership that the collaborating writers draw but it does little beyond that.

However, webmentions that let people know when I respond to their essays, share them on social media or something else, and good old e-mails that allow my readers to carry forward a discussion from one of my essays always make my day. But there is a lot of room to strengthen this. If we do strengthen it, we get the best of both worlds: independence in writing, a thoroughly personal website, and a lot of seamless inter-website conversations on the same sort of platforms that served the original content. This would be another great step towards avoiding the separation of content and context even if, ironically, done through the very webmentions I have previously been sceptical about.

However, there is a third argument Jay makes that is perhaps more relevant to my own interests than most: that the indieweb, by and large, is ‘something that requires one to teach themselves a set of technical skills, preventing it from being a more communal pursuit.’ I had made this argument a few years ago in the context of webmentions and how they make it especially hard for people who are not technically proficient from ever getting on the network. Other federated protocols have been no better: Mastodon was (and possibly still is) confusing for new people looking to join. These are great endeavours but they somehow all come with an immense learning curve, perhaps because they all started off as technically savvy individuals building for other technically savvy individuals and never broke past that bubble. A lot of intentionally commercial technologies were built so you could mindlessly onboard everybody; not Mastodon and not, it seems, a lot of the IndieWeb.

All this reminds me of what Joel Dueck calls ‘publishing nerds’, people who revel in packaging and producing words after writers have created them. This would make it easy for everyone to blog because the learning curve starts and ends at knowing how and what to write. But it would, in all likelihood, leave us with a new commercial product. Someone has to feed the publishing nerds.

So until that becomes a part of a Star Trek-like Utopia, and until webmentions become plug-and-play, and until setting up a website that is personal, customisable and tailor-made becomes at least marginally simpler2 we will likely have to live with the post-publishing black hole with which we have become so familiar. On the back end though, if the process of writing is a lonely one for you, or you want your own Inklings, I think collaborative writing can be a promising, if happily unending, experiment.

Addendum After I published this essay Rodrigo Ghedin wrote to me about my claim that setting up a ‘personal, customisable and tailor-made’ website needs to be simpler, helpfully pointing out that services like Mataroa, Bear Blog, Pagecord and Pika are ‘simple as it gets, just lack bigger exposure.’ I agree with this sentiment and, having tried Mataroa, Bear Blog and Pika myself, agree that these are indeed extremely simple to set up and run. The reason I did not mention them in my essay was that they are still not, in my opinion, sufficiently customisable to the point where they can be stamped entirely with their owner’s taste, quirks and identity. Nevertheless, for anyone looking to get started quickly with a blog these services are worth checking out. Thanks, Rodrigo.

Addendum 2 Juhis and I discussed quite a lot of offshoots from this essay of which I want to mention a couple that might be relevant to a wider audience. First, the type of content could greatly affect engagement: in Juhis’s experience his educational content seemed to naturally generate more engagement compared to, say, personal essays. Second, while the point about making technical stuff like webmentions simpler stands, Juhis rightly pointed out that ‘the feeling of connection comes through putting an effort into it rather than through automation.’ In other words most people write and expect engagement without putting effort into participating with others themselves. So, while writing is integral to blogging, we should start treating participation with other blogs as a similarly important activity. Unless, that is, we do not mind however long it takes to generate some engagement and hope that it snowballs organically. Maybe. Thanks, Juhis.

For instance it is nice to know that about 800 people have read that linked essay over the last three months, or at least spent more than 3 min on that page anyway. On a more serious note it tells me, as I also explain in that essay for example, whether I am within the limits of my typeface license terms. ↩ 1. I know squarespace exists, and Wordpress and Wix and whatever new kid is on the block, but why those platforms are inadequate is a whole other debate. ↩