I am completely biased when I tell you that one way you can squirm your way out of the endless grip of the algorithms—and still feed that yearning to be online—is to seek out more independent writing.

I had a moment the day before I sat down to write this post.  See, I had written a piece about my own views on independent publishing, noting that I was not beholden to the grips of the influencer culture. Mainly this is because I am fortunate enough to be (a) self-funded, (b) generally disinterested in that kind of fame, and (c) I have been approaching my writing and posting from an activist mindset in that I am doing it for the purpose of advocating and sharing content for the sake of educating or informing others.

I had shared the link on a social feed…to which the first comment reply was “oh sure. guess we’ll see what you post tomorrow.”

His implication was that I was feigning independence in some hidden agenda effort to what? To build false trust and that I would later flip-flop and abuse said trust?

Heck, I can’t blame people for being skeptical, obviously, and I can only point to twenty-five years of not doing that as counter-evidence—but, yeah, maybe one more post will change me. Sigh.

The fact is that we do exist.  There are still creatives who see the internet as something more than grift. There are many people just like me posting words for the joy of writing, sharing ideas scoped around hope and truths (as best as we can untangle them) and doing it for the purpose of being purposefully human. There are those of us that simply want to communicate.

The corporate feeds are selling your attention, luring you into spending more money on their customer’s websites, and harvesting your personal information as gravy on top of all that.

Independent writers like me, hosting blogs on cheap commodity-grade servers and paying our expenses out of pocket are just trying to give you something without asking anything in return—except maybe a share or a little help spreading our URLs around.

I have no algorithms, at least not that kind. I have a laptop, software and a cup of tea in a cafe: so small ask and a bit of advice. Read more blogs and make the world a slightly better place.