When I launched this site, I had a whole theory about what it would be. I’d write about what actually interests me rather than chasing fads, skip the tracking, and see where it goes. No growth hacking, no algorithm chasing. Just a homestead on the open internet.

A year and a half later, I’ve published more than thirty articles and a full run of monthly newsletters. It’s a real body of work now, and somewhere in the accumulation it stopped feeling like an experiment and started feeling like a practice. So this seems like a good moment to look up from the work and ask myself how it’s going.

The honest answer is: mostly well, but not quite as I imagined.

The biggest gap between my plan and reality is promotion. I had ideas. I was going to cross-post to Medium and LinkedIn, maybe find my way to Bluesky or Mastodon, connect with others writing about similar things. I have done none of that, and oddly, I haven’t particularly wanted to.

I’ve spent some time trying to understand my own hesitation here, and I don’t think I’ve fully gotten to the bottom of it. Part of it is a fear of the treadmill (the feeling that once you start, you have to keep going, that you’ll find yourself obligated to post and promote on someone else’s schedule). But the bigger part, I think, is that the platforms available for this kind of promotion require you to become a different kind of person online. They reward the highly curated self, the life that always looks amazing, the confident authority who knows things other people should hear. That’s not what I’m doing here, and showing up in those spaces to promote this site would mean borrowing their conventions even when I’m arguing against them.

There’s also something I have to name honestly: imposter syndrome. The internet is saturated with experts telling people what to do or think, and I find a lot of that ecosystem genuinely off-putting. I can always point to someone who knows more than I do about anything I write about. I don’t feel qualified to tell anyone what to think. What I try to do is share my own thinking, which is constantly changing, and trust readers to draw their own conclusions.

The way the writing has evolved reflects that. Early on, more of what I published had an instructional bent: here’s how to do this thing, here’s what to consider. That framing still shows up occasionally, and sometimes it’s the right frame. But I’ve become much more deliberate about it. More of what I write now is like an essay rather than a tutorial. The shift happened slowly, but looking back it feels significant. I have opinions, to be sure, and I don’t hide them. I just try to have a bit of humility as my own thinking evolves, and realize I don’t always have good answers.

The results of not promoting my posts are about what you’d expect. I’ve reached out to a handful of people whose work has shaped how I think. Most are writers who gave me something to think about or share, using their work as a catalyst to explore in my own directions. I’ve let them know how much their work has mattered, and how it’s helped me, my students, and colleagues think through hard questions. Out of six or seven notes, I’ve only heard back once (thanks, Cory!). That’s not surprising; these are busy, well-known people. But it’s notable for a different reason: there’s now so much AI-generated fan mail flooding into anyone with a major online presence that real human messages are harder to distinguish. I’m aware that my genuine note may read like an AI prompt output, which is very deflating even though I fully recognize the exquisite irony.

What the site has given me is real and worth acknowledging. The repetition of starting from an idea, organizing thoughts around it, drafting, editing, finishing, and publishing has made me noticeably better at communicating. I find myself more articulate in conversations with folks about the topics I write about. The writing forces clarity that the thinking alone doesn’t. And there’s something that hasn’t happened with my music over years of practice: I’m actually finishing things and getting them out the door.

But naming what’s missing is part of the accounting. I’ve made a kind of peace with this decidedly quiet little corner of the internet. What I haven’t figured out is how to find people to think alongside. When I imagined promoting this work on Mastodon or Bluesky, the appeal was never really about getting more readers. It was about finding others wrestling with the same questions and being in dialogue with them. I haven’t found a way to do that without stepping into systems that feel wrong to me for other reasons.

The door stays open on that. Maybe there’s a version of showing up in those spaces that doesn’t require becoming someone I’m not. Maybe the community finds its own way. Maybe I’m just lazy. What I’m confident of, a year and a half in, is the project itself: an independent site that represents my voice, where I’ve stayed true to what I set out to do. The rest can wait.