UnCONventional

So I continue to neglect this blog, though I probably shouldn’t. One of the biggest issues I have with the modern internet is that everything is centralized into a handful of sites when it comes to community and talking with friends.

In the old 1.0 days of the internet, we used to build our own spaces. This was the space that I chose to build for myself, and it served me well for quite some time. The forum was small but active. I updated this blog multiple times a week, and followed friends through RSS feeds. It was a space that was ours.

But now it sits here more a memory than anything else. I maybe make one post a year, and spend all my time on Tumblr, Discord, and occasionally Facebook. And the thing is… I have a community on those services. Nerd & Tie has a Discord that runs at a steady hum. But our data lives on services we don’t control. As Twitter has shown us, the spaces we thought we had can disappear at the whims of billionaires who only see us as engagement on a spreadsheet.

And it’s exhausting.

So I decided to do something about it.

In the year 2023, we’re launching an official set of Nerd & Tie Forums — we’re calling it NerdAndTie[dot]Social and it’s a community that’s all our own. Right now we’re in a soft launch (I expect very few people will actually read this post so it’s not really a public announcement), with the hopes of getting everything locked down and settled in the next week.

Then we’ll tell more folks about it.

And maybe it’ll fail. Maybe no one will use them. But we’re going to give it a shot. Complaining about things only gets you so far — sometimes you need to offer solutions.

So I’m doing that.

(Also, Forum software is way better in 2023 than it was in 2000… holy crap.)