Benjamin Rivers

I’m an middle-ager who grew up before the web, and who learned HTML as his second language after English. I’ve had accounts pretty much everywhere, and I’ve always maintained a website of some kind (either personal or professional). The idea of owning your own content isn’t new — it’s what I always knew the web to be.

Thanks to some friends, a steady diet of podcasts like The Vergecast, and my own fatigue at the increasing enshittification of social media, I’ve been reading and thinking about the IndieWeb movement and POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) a lot. It sure made a lot of sense — it’s the way we’ve always done things!

So I thought I’d try micro.blog as a way to have a home for a personal blog, separate from my indie game studio’s own blog, and way to get those thoughts out easily to others. As I write this, my Mastodon, Bluesky, Medium, and LinkedIn accounts are supported. As Threads joins the ActivityPub protocol, I hope to be able to cross-post there too.

It’s funny, but the final straw that made me want to jump into a proper, POSSE-friendly blog was that scene from David Fincher’s The Social Network, where the movie version of Mark Zuckerberg is drunk-posting on his LiveJournal while he hammers out the code for Facebook precursor FaceMash.

Just look at that gorgeous Sony Vaio laptop

I totally had a LiveJournal. I had one even as my career in videogames was beginning — and I was reminded this not too long ago when I was auto-prompted by LiveJournal that my ancient account would be removed for inactivity. I forgot it even existed, and that it was active!

Was there anything truly embarrassing on there? Did I drunk-post something terrible back in 2008 or so? I managed to gain access to my account and was greeted with the backdraft of naivete and mundanity that so often lingers in the abandoned writings of our younger selves. Thankfully, there was nothing questionable, but I did feel a pang of nostalgia at reading an old post about jamming on game ideas with an old friend.

For so many reasons, that felt like several lifetimes ago. It was, really, when you consider all that’s happened in the world since 2008.

So ever since that moment when I re-watched The Social Network (still a 10/10, by the way; even though accuracy isn’t its strongest suit), I’ve been thinking about blogs. I’ve been thinking about LiveJournal. And now here I am, writing a blog post like it’s 2008 — except now I’ve been married for almost a quarter of a century, run a business that employs people, and only get calls for funerals now, and not weddings.

Let’s see where this goes, shall we?