As I transition back onto my personal website, I want to find a way to have a personal friends list to connect with here: a list of trusted connections that will receive exclusive blog posts. It’s a challenge I haven’t yet solved but I have some ideas. But let’s step back for a moment so I can explain better.
Many years ago, in the age of Friendster becoming a social network, I installed a web forum called phpBB here for a couple of reasons:
- Give people a central place to socialize
- Keep track of birthdays
I thought it would be neat to give people I know a central place to have conversations and talk about things. I can’t find the number now but I believe I had close to 50 people sign up and that was helpful for me. It was effectively a contact list. Some people left their birth dates, others left more information. I could use this to keep track and personalize my greetings to people, mainly for #2 above.
I actually like the idea of a friends list and I think we see various forms of them online. Most apps or sites describe this as your social media connections, using terms like Followers, Following, or Friends. But why am I highlighting this?
Privacy
When I know my writing goes into a tunnel, such as private messaging, direct messaging or custom publishing to the various friends lists or followers, I can let my guard down a little and be more personal.
See this image above? Look at the bottom right side where it says “Friends”.
Facebook profiles can be closed from the broader ecosystem as well as the internet. The form above provides some form of nuanced privacy control when broadcasting your writings. Outside of Facebook collecting and selling everyone’s data, this is a form of encapsulation that allowed me to be more vulnerable than I am on the broader internet. It’s a convenient but effective mirage.
Social participation
If we’re connected online, it’s possible you’ve noticed my participation in social media dwindled starting in 2017. I’ve had a complicated relationship with these various sites since the late 2000s and had my ups and downs. I grew envious when I saw more people I know sign up and almost exclusively use these services.
I blogged a lot in early to mid-2000s with all kinds of random posts. My writings began at the end of college and this was the outlet to all those who weren’t in the same place as I was. I moved from Colorado to Texas to California and traveled at least a couple times a year, or more, in most of that decade. So keeping up with people was not easy and this was a place I could send people.
But that envy of MySpace and later Facebook took its toll. It effectively silenced me in the early 2010s. I lost the motivation to write here into the void. But I’m now apart of what’s being labeled as the old guard of the web, looking back at a time in the first millennial decade where the web was a playground for anyone who cared. And I believe more than ever that this type of connection should not be solely enclosed by walled gardens of social media sites who prey on me.
Connection
So what’s this leading to? More blog posts here. Right now they’ll be public, open to the whole world, syndicated to social sites at times, and available for you to leave comments and participate if you want. Maybe you’ll just read or skim, that’s fine too.
Ultimately, I would like to recreate a friends list here. I want to create a tunnel for people who care and want more than sometimes-bland, often-technical public blog posts. When you “add” me, when you “follow” me, when we make a trusted connection that shares a common secret between each other, I can make more personal statements and know these words are going to people who I want them to see.
But I haven’t figured this part out yet. Maybe it’s making encrypted posts that my trusted connections can view. Maybe it’s something else that I haven’t thought of. I want it to be something you can sign up for, you can click, you can follow, and I can approve, similar to what we’re already used to.
Privacy might be increasingly difficult, maybe it’s mostly dead online, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try to take it back in small ways. Ways that’ll benefit both of us.
Let’s see how long it takes for me to come up with a way to have a personal friends list for asuh.com. Once this happens, you can have your own site/profile/blog and do the same.
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
