Blogs were the first iteration of the social network. To put it simply, we became friends. We’ve finally located our people. Those letters were sent from our own hands. We exchanged letters often. To help newcomers find interesting and high-quality blogs, we maintained an informal system of self-policing links between us.

I long to visit again

Personal weblogs or “blogs” played a significant role in the development of Web 2.0, which is characterised by a more streamlined and interactive experience compared to the Web 1.0 environment.

When I was growing up, everything was easy. A number of free hosting sites were available, including GeoCities, Yahoo, Blogger, and Diaryland, where you could sign up for a site, create a blog, and start writing using a WYSIWYG editor, all before you even had to pay anything.

For the more daring, there was always the option to buy a domain name, pay for hosting, and launch a real website.

No matter which style a person preferred, they were still entering their thoughts, both lengthy and brief, into a screen and broadcasting them for the rest of the world to read.

Due to the lack of social media at the time, we had to resort to writing introspective blog posts and engaging in heated debates in the comments sections of our own sites. We were living in the good old days.

Greater social bonds united people

Connections between people were much stronger. Since anybody could tell who owned a blog by checking its WHOIS information, anonymity was limited at best. You easily removed the trolls by disabling their ability to post in your comments area again.

When Twitter first appeared, its users went there to publish “microblogs,” or short, frequent missives, as opposed to the lengthier, more introspective items we often publish on our blogs. Similar to the rest of the universe, it had its own evolution and is now the hellscape we despise but can’t escape.

Seeing Elon Musk’s disastrous reign over Twitter has made me miss my old days of personal blogging. In light of Twitter’s demise and the ongoing loss of traditional media, I believe it is time to revive personal blogging with renewed vigour.

Make your own website and run it the way you want

Personal blogging has to make a resurgence for one simple reason: we all need to be the masters of our own content.

Our connection to these social media sites is shaky at best, as recent events on Twitter have shown if they haven’t before. What happens if the means through which we are now increasing our online profile are suddenly rendered inaccessible?

To what end is all of your hard work being put? Can you tell me where I can find a repository for all of your hilarious jokes and online memes? What are you going to do with all the selfies you took while feeling adorable and didn’t delete?

Since we don’t run Twitter, the short answer is that we have no idea (or Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok). There is nothing we could do if one of these providers suddenly chose to stop serving us permanently.

Having a personal blog is a fantastic method to manage your own content and platform.

A return to the art of sharing one’s own tale is something that has been forgotten

The most interesting blogs let us see into the private world of someone we “know” virtually. We came back every day because of the engaging conversation that ensued after the stories were told.

Twitter threads don’t work, and Elon’s purported proposal to expand tweet length to 4,000 characters won’t help, either (I swear, if I see anyone tweeting out 4,000 characters, that is an immediate block).

When you stop and think about it, the personal experiences shared on blogs are a kind of historical documentation. They are primary sources in the annals of history; do you want The New York Times or The Washington Post telling your tale, or do you want your narrative recounted in your own words, when people look back to see what occurred during this period in our lives?

Returning to the original point, the internet is a great place to create relationships with others.

It was encouraging to see people form tight-knit groups based on their shared love of certain blogs. It was a place to connect with like-minded individuals and have meaningful conversations about the topics that were important to you as a group.

Nowadays, individuals use the internet to present their ugliest selves to the world, and it’s a really unpleasant sight to see. You may reclaim the upper hand by creating blogs and instituting comment control (a breeze on WordPress and Blogger).

Most of social media is an unregulated free-for-all where trolls may spread their poisonous rhetoric without consequence. There are a number of options available to you that will enable you to block abusive users from your comments section while still facilitating a community of your choosing for the individuals who like your writing and ideas.

Write your own blogs and reclaim your authority

This was the original intention of the Internet, and it is something that has to be restored immediately.

Nothing is certain about Twitter or any of these other sites at this point. As yet, we have no idea how Web 3.0 will affect the web. We may be certain that we’ll all be here, eager to converse with one another and share our ideas and experiences. Writing a blog for yourself is the quickest and easiest method to accomplish all of these goals.

Get the domain name right now. Separate yourself from the crowd on the web. Share your experiences, network, and thoughts with the people around you. The scale is not important. It’s not necessary to go overboard. The wheel has already been invented; there’s no need to feel your way along. It is not necessary, and in fact it is not desirable, for it to occupy the same virtual real estate as other similar resources currently available on the web. This is something you’ve made. What you say is entirely up to you. You should be able to see bits of yourself in it.