xxiivv

When I started this anti-blog, I wrote that I’ll never know if anyone reads it. I do still very much prefer to never know if my content is being read, but for the better part of a year since I started this I took my intent as never sharing it. At the end of my post I did say:

If you happen to be a real person, you’re welcome to read along, though I’ll never know if you do.

Recently I learned about webrings, a concept of the old internet where websites link to each other and you have a little corner of the internet where people can find your site. The idea fascinated me, and I wished I could contribute something to one, but I felt my goal here prevented me from sharing.

Initially I thought that allowing my website to be indexed by search engines is passive, but listing myself on a webring is active. Thinking about that more though, it was an active choice to put this site online to begin with. I could’ve just kept it a local copy and never hit publish–it wouldn’t have been an experiment, but it would’ve still been my private journal. So in this sense publishing my website and allowing it to be indexed by search engines/becoming discoverable was an active choice of mine. I wasn’t naive to think that search engines would never find it.

And by this same thread I decided that a small, active choice to become part of a webring still falls in line with my objectives here. On some level I do want my content to be read, otherwise I never would’ve published it. I just don’t want to know if someone has read it.

The biggest thing against joining a webring is that I still want to write this content with the assumption no one will ever read it. It’s my journal after all, and I want to pour my private thoughts out without the mental overhead of who is reading it. After spending some time thinking about it, I think I can still write here without letting this little bit of increased site discovery influence me.

Of course, my site might get rejected from the webring altogether, in which case this will have just been a brain exercise. I’m okay with that possibility too.