Re: Radio 77 Operating for 50 years with audience of one

Responding to

This article on Circumlunatic Ramblings

I’m coming at this from the opposite direction than a lot of others. I put up this site in 2009 (that version was on http, obv). I haven’t been on social media outside of Story Games pretty much before it folded. I’ve had email and Jabber, but those are silent most days. So I haven’t really known if people were actually seeing my stuff.

Because of the 2020 isolation, I decided to go on social media. First IRC and then, a few weeks later I went on CAPCOM and Fedi at around the same time. It’s so much more inspiring to write and draw stuff now.

For a while, it was up for around a year around 2016 I even had a “microblog” i.e. I would post single-sentence thoughts to my normal blog. (Just normal RSS.) That was the most anxiety-inducing, awful... It was like talking out into nothingness. It felt like going to a restaurant, sitting down across an empty chair, and saying things knowing that anyone could hear (which felt embarrassing) but not knowing if anyone was hearing or even wanted to hear.

I don’t get a lot of feedback on my stuff even now that I’m on the aforementioned social media, and all the reading, writing and drawing is making it hard to do other stuff. Maybe I won’t keep it up, but so far it feels so much better than that ghastly experience of “talking into the void”. It’s nice to have some company!

I think that’s what’s appealing about smolnet. Company, as opposed to audience.

CAPCOM