Another Blogging App Kaka?

I know, I know, we're not supposed to re-invent wheels, we've all sang and been sang to this old folklore before. But I did it anyway, so why?

To give you a quick answer, the current blogging ecosystem simply didn't make me enjoy writing and the process of it.

Now you can go catch your next train :)

But to really score on the why, I'll give you a quick recount of my writing history - on the web.

I started writing in college, when Wordpress was all the rage and anyone who had that .wordpress subdomain was simply a genius. I remember signing up on the blue website and writing a few articles, and the joy that was sharing the links with my classmates, who probably didn't read halfway through.

I doubt I ever reached article number 3 before I gave up, and I have a solid reason why. Back then, to be honest, I thought that by participating on the web - building blogs therein, writing articles for it, sharing them and increasing the overall value of the world wide thing, somebody somewhere will wire me some money, somehow! 😆 Funny right!!! Well, every story has a beginning :)

So when it occurred to me that no one was simply going to pay me for participating on the web, I gave up writing. 

Does this mean someone is going to pay me to write on this new blogging system I am building? Yes :). The how is different now, but I am positive that writing is going to directly or indirectly make my account cash-flow positive. Not that this is the main goal for me starting a new blog, nope, but it is one of them. And not only do I want this to generate some sort of income for me alone, but, sometime soon,  I want this to happen for other authors too. 

Then that begs the question, why not use some of the many paying blogging systems available? 

Welp, having a paywall behind my written content is one of the things I strongly am against - I am all for sharing content freely for everyone to benefit. Many people do not realise just how hard getting that $5 a month to subscribe to your members-only publication is for someone in a developing country, and by charging, you are just increasing that knowledge gap. I know there are many nuances to this and it may be beneficial to charge in some cases, but for me, I'll stick to making general written content free for everyone.

How then will you get paid for writing on the web? Well, that's the 60 million dollar question isn't it, hold your horses!

After that wp phase, newer kids joined the block and I tried a handful, and hit high readership numbers in some of them.  By this time I was early on in my career and I had known better about how the web works. The numbers felt nice, but they didn't mean as much at that time, I was just sharing about my journey and I wanted to have a sort of a journal for myself - and for anyone else who might find my stories interesting.

One thing that stopped me from writing with them entirely again is that, at some point, it felt like I was writing for them. I was no longer writing stuff for myself, but for them. whilst I just wanted a small corner for myself to write about stuff on the internet, I found myself writing for publications and for everyone on those systems. That is not what I wanted.

This is not to mention the complicated onboarding processes with some of them - wanting me to choose topics I am interested in. No boss, I didn't come here to read stuff, I came here to write for myself and a few other people who wanna read what I write. Dang, writing on the web is so convoluted and hard these days!

Of course I will still like to read what  other nice people wrote on their systems, but not in the way it was presented.

So here's to an attempt to change that - first for myself, then for everyone else who wants to experience that pure writing experience again, one step at a time.

Until next time, ciao!