this website and why it exists

the website you’re reading this on is generated using hugo and hosted on neocities. this is unusual, as far as i can tell. most authors’ blogs that i’ve seen are tumblr or wordpress; work is posted on scribblehub or ao3 or similar. i thought it’d be useful to talk about why i’m not doing this.

tumblr currently still allows erotica. this is good! but they used to allow porn, and now they don’t.

similarly, there’s some cool stuff going on in the weird queer twitter microfiction space. however, a website whose logo is being used for pump and dump scams is not a reliable home for your work. twitter might not be long for this world. even if it does survive, if you’re doing anything too interesting or transgressive, the specter of the mass report always hangs overhead.

(case in point: when i first wrote the above paragraph, it was still called twitter. now it’s called x. lmao.)

no platform will be your friend. if you post something important somewhere, have a backup. for me, this is where static site generators come in handy, but this depends on your medium. a hard drive full of pngs or mp3s can work just as well. the important part is to have something you can you can take with you if your account gets deleted or a site goes under.

no platform will be your friend. no platform will be your friend.

i’d like to address specifically why i’m not using wordpress or ao3, because i think it’s valuable to outline. wordpress is a fine choice, but it’s not quite right for my purposes. i don’t need a lot of the features it provides, so it constrains my choice of hosting platform for little benefit. (i don’t particularly care about having a comments section, for instance.) a static site is simple and dirt cheap to host; having anything running on the server increases cost & complexity.

as for ao3… it’s taken a while to get my thoughts on it down, mostly because it took a while to settle on how much i want to Get Into It. i could just say “it’s largely for fanfiction, which i don’t write.” that’d be sufficient, i guess, but one of my favorite authors uses it to host original fiction.

this isn’t a blanket condemnation of the site — i have friends who post their work on it. i know there’s interesting stuff going on there, and given the current copyright landscape, it’s nice to have somebody advocating for transformative work…

…but despite all that, i can’t really bring myself to want anything to do with it. obviously it’s a big volunteer effort, and those cannot effectively be moderated, but policies are a signpost, and with that in mind: i’m really, super uncomfortable with the explicit allowance of RPF (or “real person fiction”) and i don’t want a connection between that shit and my work.

i generally try to be permissive about art. i don’t like to condemn things unless they cause Real Material Harm. a lot of the conversation around art causing Real Material Harm strikes me as reactionary, searching for cudgels to wield against unpalatable artists. i have a line, though, and writing about random internet microcelebrities fucking each other crosses it. it is essentially sexual harassment, and i don’t want to lend my support to a platform that actively endorses it.

maybe i’d be able to swallow that discomfort if it was the best platform for me, but it really, really isn’t. ao3 is full of metrics — views, kudos, comments, bookmarks. genuine brain poison and self-esteem annihilator. the whole pursuit of clout and aggregated eyeballs leaves me nauseous, and i prefer to keep that sphere at arm’s length. better to write for a small handful of people i know than seek a faceless audience.

i hope this helps explain my stance on websites and online. if you only take one thing away from this: please back your things up. never trust a platform. if you’re up for it, making your own website is very satisfying. (i’ve heard good things about zonelets.) otherwise, ensure you keep backups.

capital will never care about art. your work is too important to entrust platforms with its preservation.