Recovering Engagement-o-Holic

One of these days I'm going to pay for a proper hosting service just so I can set up a php form so that you, my awesome reader, can send me a message and tell me how much my writing means to you.

Of course I know that's probably not going to happen, that's my Social Media addicted brain speaking. Who is even reading this any way? It is a little hard to write things that, in many ways, mean a lot lot me, and have zero idea who reads it, zero dopamine reward; there's no "like", no comments, not even a basic web traffic metric. Is this how it used to be before? Am I just talking to the void? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Is the void looking back? Hello, Void!. But in another way it's easier to write like nobody's reading, it's liberating.

I have a Neocities.org page that I opened about a year and a half ago that I've spent a lot of time at, wrote a buch of things that I'm proud of and in that time managed to get 9 followers. It seems like nothing, but it probably isn't. Besides the engagement (or lack thereof), I am grateful that it gave me a lot of motivation to write more and to search out for other small-web/indie-web pages and communities. It's also just fun. The small engagement features it has —even if they are very diluted compared to a bigger social network and it certainly helps with the transition— still make it, in the end, a sort of walled garden, although with a low wooden fence, not a big stone wall... But anyway, bad metaphores apart, I am now completely free from that, now I'm just floating in the wide open sea of the Web, throwing my message in a bottle.