Bear or me
An overwrought title, for a simple conundrum that I've been grappling with today.
To backtrack a bit: so I finally upgraded to a Bear Blog subscription last night. Pretty happy about it, in the way that I truly enjoyed tinkering around with my blog in the late aughts. Tinkering around here led me to finally checking out the Discover page, and I spent an enjoyable couple of hours reading different sorts of blogs.
It was heady, reading honest thoughts from people I didn't know and who probably don't know I exist and am reading their blog. But the fact that we're all here at Bear Blog means--I think--that we were looking for an alternative to the loudness and commodification of regular social media.
Anyway, I suppose feeling a connection to some of the blogs led me to thinking about actually trying to connect. Not necessarily me sending a comment via email, but figuring out whether I want to provide the comment option here, also via email. Which then led to thoughts of discoverability, because hey, I guess now with the subscription, this blog is already being indexed by search engines?
The problem being thinking about discoverability means thinking about audiences, and frankly, I am f*cking enjoying being the only audience for this blog. I mean, sure, there might be one or a few souls reading it (I doubt), but I don't really know, do I? And I'm honestly kind of comfortable with that for now.
So now the tension is to fix this blog in the way I fixed my old blog-- providing avenues for connecting, thinking about how other people receive it, figuring out whether I want to see bigger numbers below that arrow at the bottom of the posts (my God, I did not know I could click on that arrow for a "like" or "upvote")--or...not.
I'd like to say I'm comfortably in the "not" camp, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't still periodically think about gaining a bigger audience and exposing people to my thoughts.
Do I maximize all the features of Bear I've seen so far, or do I keep this small, for me?
Obviously the answer is to choose myself, but I will not be the first person, nor the last, to act against her own interests.
Anyway, this is more of a blogging update than a reading one. (Update: Less than 100 pages of FRENCH EXIT to go. Frances is still a spoiled dilettante, but she is a force of nature.) But what a lovely thing to feel like we're blogging for real again.