Do it

If you think it would be fun, go for it. You can always stop if it turns out you don’t enjoy it as much as you thought but we can always do with more humans writing interesting things.

Do what you enjoy and do it for yourself. If someone else likes it great, but you’re doing it primarily for YOU, nobody else.

AI would use it certainly. So might people. I dunno. I don’t see what you gain by not doing it honestly. May want to copywrite everything you write and do it in doc files that you put on git or something.

I’ve considered it, but I’m not aware of any blogging platforms that respect my privacy and align with my values. It’s all corpo-slop that I’ve seen.

People already accuse me of being AI because LLMs were trained on my posts (and those of others, of course), so anyone with good grammar and use of more than the five basic punctuation marks gets accused… when really, the LLMs are doing it because we taught them, with posts and whatnot they’ve scraped going back 30 years. So I know a blog will be scraped, too. But at least I can put a face to it, or at least an avatar. Because a blog is largely about the blogger and who the blogger is, matters. Whereas on Lemmy or services like it, it’s mostly about the content. No one cares who you or I are; it’s our opinions that matter.

So… what platform are you looking at? Because I’m interested in software and privacy. Linux less so, though I’m rooting for it on platforms that run Windows.

Well, I did it this year finally after thinking about it for a decade+.

One of the reasons I did it was to document stuff for future me - if I never need to redo anything I wrote about, I have a perfect manual.

The other reason is to help the community. I sometimes tend to write about fairly obscure things (like creating a Matrix bot with E2EE enabled, or mixing Go and PHP using FFI) that might actually help someone if they search for it.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I ask an AI something that’s not really mainstream knowledge, it sucks so much so I have to search anyway, so tech blogs will always be needed.

Edit: I also took it as an opportunity to learn about ActivityPub, my blog is fully federated and you can read it here on Lemmy if you want. So if you can find some learning opportunity in there, go for it!

I try to ask myself, “What else would I be doing if not this?” More often than not, it’s just ‘wasting time’ instead of creating something, connecting with someone new, passing on or absorbing knowledge from others.

I would suggest making sure your own expectations are in check before you start in. Example: ‘I have a desire to share and discuss topics of my interests, but it’s just going to be for a hobby. Not for making a side income or the like.’ This way, it’s clear to yourself, and there doesn’t have to be regret, disappointment, etc., later on.

So what’s your goal or intention for starting a “Linux, software, privacy, etc. guides” blog?

Do it for your own motivations. Thoughts you want to share with the ether are fine things. If the audience is what validates you, consider maybe a narrow focus forum that is a community of like-mined people.

About the AI issue, you can try something like Anubis to block them if you self-host your blog. If you host it on cloudflare there is option to block AI scraper(it work quite well for my blog).

Odds are, starting out with a fresh blog will be pretty slow to build up any kind of regular readership. You gotta do it because you’re passionate about the topics and enjoy writing. You won’t need to worry about AI if you have both of those traits, because you’re doing it for the sake of your own creative expression and it will naturally have a human quality that can’t be emulated.

I’d say the chances of a user of stumbeling onto your blog are low, regardless of AI. We just got used to cetralized platforms such as reddit, facebook etc.

If you want to write a blog, just do it. Regardless of the numbers of readers you might have fun and hone your skills.

My concern is in regards to AI… I think many are relying more and more on it. Making such content a waste of my time in this perspective.

Another way to frame this is “I don’t have anything new to add to what AI would write on the subject”.

Don’t you? Then why are you thinking about writing a blog? Even if it’s just a documentation of your projects, it’ll be your perspective. AI can’t write that, so people who want to read your blog aren’t going to get it from AI.

As others have said, if its fun to do, then why not?

I think the issue isn’t AI stealing your content but AI flooding the web with slop.

Once upon a time you could find a niche without much content, write a blog and maybe even monetise it with some ad space to pay for costs plus a coffee. A friend of mine used to make a surprisingly decent income with a blog about coi carp.

There was always the risk someone else would start posting in the same niche and then you’d be competing for attention.

Now, though, it’s trivially easy to spin up an AI powered blog on any topic with dozens of SEO optimised articles per day and no human effort required.

So now you’re not competing with one or two other humans in your niche, you’re competing with potentially hundreds of AISlop blogs.

Personally I’d look to publish your content in video format. Text is pretty much a lost game at this point, video might hold out a little longer because it’s the personalities of channel owners that keeps people coming in.

Is Geocities still a thing?

Joking aside, if it makes you feel good, is something you genuinely want to do, and your speech isn’t harmful or oppressive to others, then you do you.