My last blog post was the first one I posted without my relatively successful Twitter account (which I deactivated last year). It’s about activism, and I don’t feel too comfortable posting on Facebook, where I mostly share with people from my old gaming community, my family and my colleagues. I’m very tired of Mastodon, where I just set up an automatic post linking to the article, and of Instagram. I don’t have a newsletter. I also don’t have tracking on the blog. Bref: I have no idea whether more than 2 people have read the post.
It feels weird.
I love the IndieWeb, and I’m trying to build this blog following their main principles. I also love the idea of bringing personal blogging back. I just have this nagging feeling (knowledge?) that if I’m not using social media to share my writing, and the search engine algorithm favor things that are written carefully for their consideration rather than for a good reading experience, then I’m stuck. How will people discover my writing? How will I keep creating posts that I’m proud of, without the external motivation of getting likes and retweets and views?
I’m trying to view writing as this personal exercise, as in «oh, next time someone complains/talks/asks about X, I’ll send them a link to my article so that I don’t need to have the same conversation over and over again». I really hope this will be enough motivation, and I’ve always heavily relied on external cues that my work was valuable.
Re-learning to publish for the content and not for the clout feels harder than it should be.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting/needing some external motivation!
Back when I was teaching, I often used extrinsic rewards (usually symbolic, like a sticker) to help them persevere and eventually find their own intrinsic motivation. Just the acknowlegment of their hard work was very motivating!
I think it’s very human to want to know that others find our work valuable 🙂
… So what I’m saying is I’ll try and leave comments a bit more, so you can have some non-algorithmically driven, human acknowledgement ^^’
I almost mentioned you as someone who is already giving me a lot of acknowledgement because I have a deep-seated belief that you read everything I post haha
You are entirely correct! Though I sometimes take my time with the longer ones :p