A community of netizens

I think I've finally found something I've been searching for since the very start of kaleidoughscope: a community of bloggers.

It's not just bloggers that are part of this online community that I'm about to speak on. There's programmers and writers and system administrators and webmasters and students and scientists and many more of course, and most of them don't identify as bloggers like I am wont to do, but many of them maintain blogs on personal websites. And they publish at least somewhat regularly. Sure, some might have published but a few posts here and there over a couple years' time, and these places are like singular time capsules into the lives of people I've never met and interest me in and of themselves. But there are others who have decades of writing laid bare, kinda like here, and these make for engaging archive perusal by me. Both these kinds of people are bloggers in my eyes.

So I've uncovered a veritable trove of websites published by people who appreciate the internet for what it once was and what it can be: not corporate and "FAANG"-owned. Many of these folks have meticulously crafted and maintain their own personal websites, using free and open-source tools, and made the decision to not rely on the big guys like Amazon and Google. It's really inspiring, and something I aspire to do one day with this blog (Blogger started out independent but was bought by Google back in 2003).

I check in here and there on the Discord server that, to me, serves as a meeting place for this community: The 32-Bit Cafe. Like many cool things I've discovered online, I stumbled on it purely by chance (using a discovery engine like StumbleUpon - CloudHiker it's now called). The people that make up this loose community are from all over the world, and are of different ages and genders, and are from different socioeconomic backgrounds; they are, like me, global netizens. The "tech-saviness" floating around this server is impressive: I constantly find myself "knowingly" nodding along to conversations about some obscure computer protocol until I realize I don't actually know what they're talking about, like, at all. But, that makes me appreciate the discussion even more, and lights up my curiosity!

But what's the primary reason I'm so excited about having discovered this community?

Because blogging/writing is lonely as hell, man. But seeing others who write about their lonely or not-so-lonely hells ultimately encourages me to write more. It reminds me that it's possible to be lonely - together.

That's right: it wouldn't be a classic kaleidoughscope post if I didn't manage to sneak in a Paramore reference. The worst part is, I've already written extensively about this song in a previous post a decade ago. My updated take on it is that it's a song about writing and writers. That's how I now choose to interpret it and the beauty of music is that you can do that.

Anyway, here's that "lonely" Paramore song, Be Alone: