Colin Walker

Last night, I embarked on one of my semi-regular feed culls; there were a few reasons.

I noticed that some of the feeds had been quiet so did some checks and removed those that had, sadly, been shuttered. I then looked at the most recent updates and removed those that hadn't posted in months.

It wasn't just that blogs hadn't been updated in a while, I noticed that I was marking things as read just to get the numbers down. There was a sense of guilt that I wasn't reading certain things because I didn't have the headspace for them.

There were posts I wanted to read that sat in /reader while I dismissed those around them, and I never got around to reading them.

There were a few other blogs that I no longer "vibed with" so they went too. It's not a comment on the authors, just that my tastes or priorities changed.

Recently, I have seen a number of people blogging about blogging: Should they stop? Why blogs are/aren't isolated. Why they hadn't posted in a while. Nostalgia for the "old web", and the like.

There seems to be a growing dissatisfaction with the internet. Whether it's due to the state of the world right now, or politics and the division it causes, or merely resentment of the centralised platforms. It's as though a malaise is seeping through the web and we're all being impacted by osmosis.

It reminds me of 2016 when Brexit and the first Trump election were the prevailing winds on the web. It didn't matter how much you tried to avoid it all, it always got through.

I say that a lack of posts is usually an indicator of mental health. I wouldn't say I'm particularly depressed at present, more bored and exasperated. Bored of my job, exasperated at the state of (waves hand) all of this.

It's all just a bit … meh.

As I wrote a couple of years ago about that time:

You were told you were following the wrong people but, suddenly, just about everyone became the wrong people. Social was no longer about having fun, it was a place for outrage and division.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This isn't me saying, like I have on more than one occasion, that I'm stepping away from it all. No, I'm staying around but trying to limit what I'm exposed to.

Whether this means trying to extricate myself from the 24 hour news cycle, or muting a bunch of words on Bluesky, I don't know.

I do know, however, that I have let this affect me for too long and that I have neglected the blog. I fully intend to post more often.

We'll see how it goes.