Relaunch

It’s been some time since secondthought.media went offline. A bit more than a year maybe. Originally it was set up as a digital refuge, as a place for me in the digital realm.

Now that I’m “relaunching” (really just continuing) secondthought.media, I feel it still tries to answer the same question: where is my home online?

The missing digital places

I think I’ve always been a migratory bird. In my work and personal life as well, but also when it comes to my desire for digital places to share with others. I desperately wanted social media to work for a long time. I tried to make my home on a number of platforms, but it would always end up feeling somehow uncomfortable, show-offish.

Then came tilde.town (a shared UNIX server where everyone’s sharing the same computer like in the old mainframe days) and with it I fell in love with an internet I never experienced when it was originally around. Tilde.town meant a sense of smallness, cozyness, honest amateurism. I played with the command line tools others on the tilde built and made a hand-coded website, then switched it to hugo, then started building little tools myself. It was fun, but the best part of it was the blogging. Or rather, the way the blogging program was set up: you needed to run the software to read other people’s blogs, and it wasn’t web facing by default. It was public in a private way. This clarified my issues with other social platforms: they were either public in a public way (eg. Twitter, Instagram, etc.) or private in a public way (eg. Facebook). They were always too open, too visible, just too public.

I tried making a home in Discords for a while, but I’m not very good at keeping up with groupchats and Discords feel too much like groupchats. I’ve wanted something that’s more like a blog on tilde.town.

So what’s the most like a blog? A blog, of course! But it needs to be simple, it needs to have a tech-minimalism sort of aesthetic. It needs to look to the visitor and feel to me like it’s hand coded HTML on tilde.town. This means no CMS like Wordpress, an old-school aesthetic with simple design and fonts, like something that barely even has any CSS.

So this is what I’m trying to experience, or rather re-experience here. Along with many other little parts of my life that I’m trying to retro-ify, this is a crucial one. I hope to see you around here some more!