Return to Web Classic
Resurrecting my blog (yeah, haven’t gotten super far with that so far, have I) is about a couple of different things. Part of it as described in the neo-seminal entry is to ditch Facebook. In fact, the thing that probably occurred to me first was that I needed a place to post a manifesto on why I was quitting Facebook.
This is my manifesto for quitting Facebook. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Facebook Quitter’s Motto
I could have used a Google doc or something but I only use Google docs when neceesary; I don’t even like to capitalize it properly. Also, linking to Google docs is like linking to your underpants. People assume you’re wearing something, but it’s really your issue and they really only want to see you fully dressed.
That’s probably when I thought of Drezn again. I’ve thought about pulling up the archives from time to time over the years and hah, it’s not like anybody scooped the domain name. Once my focus was on Drezn, a few other ideas popped up.
Drezn was always about putting my writings and scribbles somewhere, including my blog. I like writing. I sometimes doodle. Facebook has never been a place for those expressions, nor for me have any other social media platforms. I briefly looked at Tumblr but signing up for another platform doesn’t interest me in the slightest. Also those “platforms” start crowding me with buttons, e-mails, pop-ups, gadgets, and their own unnecessary lingo (“clapbacks!”).
Drezn uses a site layout I designed myself and evolved. I think I started with the layout stylized as a lowercase ’d’ fairly early on along with the colour scheme but the rounded corners came later. The logo is original and while it’s no great artistic achievement it fits exactly what I want to convey, and it works perfectly as a bookmark icon as well. The colour scheme is as close as you can get to my favourite colours while having a pleasant reading experience.
It’s my own aesthetic. I get a faint flush of pleasure when I look at it. I have never gotten that from using content platforms.
I would like to see more people doing this. Some of the most valuable content on the web in my work day to day is on technical folks’ blogs, where they write about the issues they’ve been struggling with and how they’ve solved them. It’s neat sometimes to follow from those technical blogs to their “about” pages or their personal blogs. You get to learn something about other people, which helps connect us all. Because of the way platforms map their social networks, you don’t get this randomness there.
So this is about where I’m at and I came across an article on “the corrosion of internet culture. This is worthwhile reading. Another thing I read today reminded me of my past love of Usenet.
Facebook, Twitter (ugh!), Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, Medium, and so on are not going away anytime soon (well, maybe Snapchat, I have no idea). But I think there are better ways to engage on the Internet and a lot of well-engineered standards and technologies exist to give us a social network already. That seems to me the idea of the whole Internet in the first place, or at least, a lot of the application protocols built on it pretty much right away.
I don’t want to go back in time, but some of the 40-year-old protocols and the applications and networks built on them were beautiful and genuinely user-friendly. Today’s web is too often attractive but essentially hostile to people. There’s a better way to share photos, keep up to date with friends, and muse about daily life than by using centralized corporate platforms where any control is a laughable illusion.
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