Hello, everyone!

This is my first blogpost, and i have no idea where to begin. I want to say so many things, and at the same time thoughts feel so fleeting... But I shall try nonetheless.

I think I should draft a summary first, basically so I don't get lost. So, here is what we're gonna talk about:

• What drove me to start this blog?
• Where am I coming from?
• What steps do I wanna follow?

1. What drove me to this?

Short answer? Capitalism.

Long answer? Well. I was a long time Twitter user. I had been on that site for over a decade, and it is linked to some of the most important parts of my life. That's where I found amazing people that to this day remain some of my best friends. It was my peaceful nook away from the hardships of daily life. It was a place where I could, during those challenging teenage years, figure myself out without unasked for criticism. It was, in many ways, home.

But then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. The Most Divorced Man Alive bought the site and carved its corpse into a hateful, fascist den crawling with ads, bots and Human Rights Violations. I couldn't see my friends anymore. My friends couldn't see me anymore. And, most importantly, I couldn't in good conscience keep being a part of a site from which the global face of Everything That Is Wrong directly profits. A single individual had killed a very significant part of my life. It was gone, and I couldn't do anything to bring it back. I felt (still do) defenseless.

While pondering all this, I started thinking about all the other Bad ThingsTM that the current mainstream social media had had me accepting as normal. For starters, I had grown accostumed to 140 characters as the default thought length, and therfore suffered extremely when expressing myself more extensively (appart from Academic contexts, but that's a whole different way of communicating, in my opinion). In fact, this is the longest I've written about what I think in ages. This connects with the other symptom I was feeling, perhaps even more starkly: My attention span was gone and not expected to return. I used to be able to focus on a book or a drawing for hours at a time. Now, I can't go 10 minutes without checking the phone. It was driving me insane and keeping me away from what I really want to do, which is learning, building, creating.

So yeah. Something had to change.

2. Where am I coming from?

I am old enough to have experienced the Old Web before the bleak, centralized Corporate dystopia we experience today, but not old enough to have participated in it as a creator. I do remeber, however, the feeling of entering a web and exploring it in detail, instead of skimming over it because the Infinite Scroll Abyss makes it impossible to do otherwise. I remember not needing an account for everything. I remeber experiencing the Internet through a single, unmoving device. As a quote that hit me hard when I read it says:

"The Internet used to be a place."

I thought that place was dead. But then I found out about the so called "Indie Web" and about the community of people still internetting for the sake of internetting, without thinking about money or engagement. And I thought: hey, maybe I can do that.

What steps do I wanna follow?

So. The choice was made. I uninstalled all socials from my phone, so the Internet is something I can only check at home, and the rest of my time my mind is free. I deleted most of my accounts everywhere (including Amazon and things like that because if I wanna escape corporate giants might as well go all the way). I am yet to delete my main Twitter account, even though I haven't used it in three months, it feels like the final step and I'm building up courage to do it. Then I plan on creating my own web where I can express myself freely, keep full control of all the things I post and not fear the moment a capitalist fucko will make me move again. Everything is perfect!

One problem is, I have almost no idea of coding, and definitely no idea about how the web, or websites, work. So I started learning! I'm going through freecodecamp's curriculum and hope to learn enough to start building my own functioning site as soon as possible. Another problem, though, is that i don't have the money to afford hosting right now, nor do I have the knowledge to set up a home server (altough this would ideally be the final step of the plan!). But in the meantime, I need to start writing. If I don't, I would end up with a shining new web with nothing to store inside [edit: This is the shining new web, apparently! This post was reuploaded from Tumblr, remember :3]. That's where this blog comes in. I will try to use it to write longer texts, about whatever I find interesting. I need to build up a habit, and that cannot wait until I have a web of my own. So, take this as an in-between place, a mansio on the road until I arrive home.

I think that more or less covers it. I have tried this before, and always ended up downloading everything again within a week. This time, tho, something feels different. I think this time it will work. And me writing this is kind of a way of commiting to it. I am excited about this new chapter of my life :)

That's it for today! I'm actually so proud of myself for writing all of this without checking my phone xd If you have any comments, any tips or wanna share your experience, I would love to read it!! Thank you for reading till the end. ^^