One's Place in the Open Social Web

I'm waffling with a side project that's meant to replace this website as my means of publishing on the Web. As I do, I find issues with the word "publish" because it implies that I'm going to have "readers". That reader could only be me, which is fine as I write to externalize things that I want to be able to search up later. My journal holds everything (and I mean — everything) else. However, with the rise of generative AI and the companies behind the large content scraping engine gone on full nitro, I'm torn on the notion of pushing everything out to the world by default. I've made mentions of this in passing in the IndieWeb chat some time ago as I began to question the usefulness of this. This came to mind once I began to understand that there's a bit of a different experience to being public.

For those who don't use the Web in a social way, for mainly posting in their professional networks or semi-habitual check-ins among them for whatever affinity group that they lean into, there's very little that has to change. In fact, all that you would need is a blog and/or newsletter. Social, in this case, is a unidirectional "auto-chattering". In fact, "the phenomenon of blogging is one example — among many — of the triumph of a one-way model of auto-chattering in which the possibility of ever having to wait and listen to someone else has been eliminated. Blogging, no matter what its intentions, is thus one of the many announcements of the end of politics". It's potentially ironic writing this on a blog about how blogging and its "descendants" have potentially contributed to the erosion of conversation. But then I recall, reading in "Debt", the nature of actual conversation that could happen, that'd take hours, at least amongst monied white men in early America