Blogging as boring
The Internet is still what you want it to be. I want mine to be boring.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard an interesting observation from one of my favorite technologists, Scott Hanselman:
The rule on my team is that if you did a thing, there’s a URL to back up that you did that thing. If I give you a list of ten things, you should come back with 10 URLs. The URL could be a GitHub pull request, it could be a Word doc, it could be a Markdown file, it could even be a comment on a code review. … If it doesn’t have a URL, it probably didn’t happen. [source]
Even though this is a new way I will be thinking about things, it is not particularly profound. It is just eminently practical. A URL is how something persists and gets found. But not all URLs are equal: some are public and persistent. Others are gated behind logins, contingent on a platform’s continued existence or subject to decisions I do not control.
For things I want to persist, I choose the former–public and persistent. That is the whole thing. There is no drama here. There are no politics here. There is no bad guy.
This month marks one year since I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Not deactivated…actually deleted. Gone. If you’re looking for a dramatic exit story, I’m sorry to say you’ll be disappointed. This was not a statement about privacy, politics, or algorithmic manipulation. The truth was simpler: Facebook had become less interested in connecting me with the people with whom I was there to connect. But that is Facebook’s prerogative to do so as it’s their platform. Leaving was mine.
But this essay is not about Meta or Facebook. It’s not about social media. It is about where things live. That is a less interesting topic, which is the point.
I have had some sort of blog for nearly two decades now. The early years were lost to a WordPress update gone awry in 2014, which is its own lesson about persistence and backups. The middle years are being curated. But in the past couple of years, I have returned to blogging with a clearer purpose: I want what I write to stick around.
The historical record is not an argument. It is the record. Geocities is gone. MySpace is a husk. Vine is a memory. Google+ was a punchline before it was a shutdown notice. Twitter became something else entirely. These are not predictions about current platforms nor are they accusations: they are observations about what has happened, repeatedly, for as long as platforms have existed.
Platforms are transient. The question is not if they will last, but whether what you put on them is also transient.
In 2018, I shared a few observations about platform fragility. A platform I had used suspended my (then mothballed) account on that platform, apparently caught up in an automated sweep by accident.
When you create content, unless you’re hosting it on a platform that’s wholly under your control, there’s no guarantee that it will be out there in the future. That should give everyone pause.
That turned out to be far more prescient than I intended. But even that framing is too dramatic. The real lesson is much more mundane and boring: things disappear. Keep backups.
What does infrastructure you control actually look like?
For me, it’s simple. This blog is content and infrastructure I control, which is portable and backed up. If any piece of the chain failed tomorrow, I can stand up a replacement within 12 hours. If I change platforms, the content migrates. The words are not trapped in a proprietary database or gated behind a login. They are text files with URLs.
I spent six weeks building a custom content management system (CMS) for this site, which I documented. This sounds like overkill (and perhaps it is…if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing) until you remember the goal was not impressive architecture. It is boring persistence.
That is the frame I keep coming back to: boring.
Backups are boring. That is the entire point of backups. You do not want excitement in your backup strategy. You want your backups to sit there, unnoticed, until the day you need them–and then you want them to work.
A blog, in this framing, is a backup of your public thinking. Social media is exciting, dynamic, optimized for engagement. It’s also ephemeral, platform-dependent, and not yours. A blog is boring. It is persistent, portable, yours.
This is not ideology. This is not a political statement. This is not me raging against the Algorithm™. This is infrastructure planning. The same logic I apply to any important data personally or at work is what I apply here: keep copies, control the format, and do not depend on a single provider’s continued goodwill.
I apply the same thinking to my team at work. I apply this to my files. Why would I not apply it to the things I write?
There is no argument here, really. There is no statement, no polemics, no “bad guys”. This is just IT maintenance.
One year in, this boring thing is still here. The exciting things continue to churn.
A year ago, I closed an essay with this line: “The Internet is what you want it to be. Make it good.”
I still believe that. But I would add a coda now:
“The internet is what you want it to be. I want mine to be boring.”