A new beginning

I built two websites this week. I didn’t mean to. They weren’t on my task list. But that’s hyperfocus for you – something I thought I’d lost when I experienced burnout in autumn 2023. Thankfully, I seem to have finally come out the other side of that now.

My get up and go is back. I want to do so many things. And I’ve got lots of ideas pinging around.

When I saw a comment by a friend about why they don’t click Substack links, I decided to move platforms. At first I looked for alternatives. But it’s hard to find a platform that doesn’t have something about it that gives you pause and ask yourself, ‘do I want to be here?’ So I set up a subdomain on my website. Now, after 8 years of being a WordPress website owner, I have a genuine blog site!

Somewhere along the line, developers started persuading us our perfectly good tech stack wasn’t all singing all dancing enough and we needed an alternative solution. But actually, my website can provide the same functionality as Substack – and more. What will be interesting to see is whether I can attract new readers on my own.

Then, some bloke on LinkedIn wrote a post about boobs and marketing. I didn’t read it but various people decried the fact that his post went viral and their sensible, well thought out, valuable content doesn’t get seen.

An idea that I’d toyed with on and off for years resurfaced. What if… What if I could build a content sharing website with different categories?

I’ve recently been playing around with Discord and realised it’s straightforward to use and has quite a few nifty features, like live audio and visual rooms. So instead of building a website, and all the complications of that, I could create a community group where people can share their content and chat about the things they want to talk about, instead of creating performative posts to curry favour with the algorithm.

It’s called Social Media Renegades and 24 hours after putting it together, after I’d started inviting people in, I realised it still needed a website. Discord servers are private. You can’t find them unless you know they exist and where to look. This idea won’t work unless people join and start talking to each other on the message boards.

So I built a site for Social Media Renegades as well.

Another new thing I’ve started this week is using ko-fi for donations. One of the attractions of Substack was the ability for people to buy subscriptions. I realised that re:writes doesn’t really suit that – it’s a personal blog, it’s not laser focused on a single topic, or trendy, or writing about how to be successful on the platform. But I figured there’s no harm in experimenting with asking people to buy me the equivalent of a coffee if they enjoy something they’ve read.

I’m feeling quite accomplished now.

Tonight I went to a really interesting talk about the early days of the internet. I’ll be sharing that with you next week.