The following post was transcribed from an audio during my commute to work on April 8, 2025.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been involved on social media outside of LinkedIn. With LinkedIn being really my only source of social media, I find myself longing for more personal, nitty-gritty, really in-depth content from individuals.

The Depth I’m Missing

I think there’s the news and news stories that might go deep on a specific subject that a journalist is looking into, or on LinkedIn, someone might go deep on some technical thing they’re trying to explain. But I find that what I long for or crave is just a person talking really in depth about something they do or something they have and getting hyper specific into how exactly they do it, why they do it that way, what led them to that point. I find it’s just hard to find those things on the web.

The Indie Web

When I started my blog, I got into this subculture on the internet called the Indie web, where it’s a lot of people starting their own websites or space on the internet, kind of as this revolt against social media and having a company own all your data that you’re uploading and you don’t necessarily have control over it.

The idea of the Indie web is that you own your content, publish to your own site or your own space first and then can syndicate or send that out to the various social media platforms for more reach or distribution. As someone with my own personal blog, I know I don’t get a ton of visitors on there. I’ve kind of just been posting into the void for the most part.

We Can Get Grittier

Some of what I’ve tried to do on my own blog and would like to do more is just really geek out and get hyper nitty-gritty specific on things that I’m really interested in, and that’s what I wish I saw more of from other people. Like, especially people in my own life, my friends or my family.

Even just in conversations, people will talk some about something they’re interested in, but I think people have a fear of you not being interested enough or caring. Maybe feeling like what they have to share is invalid or is just weird, so people just seem to not go too deep into whatever it is they’re talking about.

Sometimes I’ll try to ask people questions and prod, and especially if I can sense that someone is excited that I’m asking about something. I love the experience of that and being able to ask them and let them expand on what they’re interested in, but it just seems like in oral conversation, people never really go as deep as they wish they could. And then I feel like online or in writing, people just feel like they need to filter themselves or folks will see them as weird if they go too deep on one particular niche subject.

My Dream World

My dream world would just be a place where people all had their own blogs and they were hyper specific into all their stuff that they’re really interested in. From reading about what people are interested in, you could get a sense of who they are and what really makes them tick and exactly how they’re doing things.

When I have seen examples of people getting into the details of how they do things, I learn from that. If I can see really hyper specific examples of how someone does something, I can take that and incorporate that into my own way of doing things, too.

I think people tend to want to share from some layer of abstraction or high level about what they’re doing or what they’ve done, but I would love to just see more people getting into details. Show pictures, show screenshots. Show me the inputs. Show me the outputs. Show me what’s happening in between all of that. And really talk about the why and what makes you really excited about that thing.

A Good Example

I think one person I’ve seen that does a good job of this is Simon Willison. He has a blog - he’s a professor somewhere. I don’t remember where I stumbled upon his blog not too long ago, but his main focus is AI. He does crazy in-depth blog posts about how he’s prompting AI or using it to build these little web tools he creates, and he gets really into details sharing the prompts, sharing the whole conversation, exactly what the output was from AI, what he’s learning about how to prompt it, and I just love that.

I would love to see more of that beyond his very hyper-focused AI content, because that’s his interest. It paints a picture of who he is and what he’s interested in and what he cares about. But I would love to see that for other things from all sorts of people.

My friends - I’m sure if my friends had blogs where they did things like that, I would get to see this side of them that, you know, I’m their friend, but maybe I don’t know that side of them that they just don’t want to share, for whatever reason. Maybe we haven’t been able to get into it deeply in conversation or just share through short little posts on X or whatever. I would love to see more of that.

My Nitty Gritty

I’d like to do more of that with the things I’m interested in, too. There are some posts I’ve got in the backlog. I’d like to write that have been in like a draft or idea state for a long time.

One example is my wallet, which is also a journal. It’s this custom setup that I created and have had for years and have kind of built up and changed and swapped around a bunch over the years. I would love to do just a really long detailed post all about my pocket journal wallet combo and how I’ve perfected it exactly to how I want it and how I like it to be and share that.

I’m sure other people would find that interesting - there’s people out there on the web, across millions of people, who could benefit from that or be interested in it. And you know, it tells you something about me and who I am and the things that I care about.

Looking Forward

So, expect to see some more of that from me, if and when I can find some more free time to write on the blog. I’m still figuring out the new routine of driving into the office every day, as I’m doing right now while I voice record this blog post, but I look forward to doing more of those in-depth nitty-gritty posts.

And as you being someone reading this, I would love to see the same thing from you. If this inspires you to do more of that, whether on your own blog or in a diary or journal or just on traditional social media, I would love to hear about it. So drop me an email or something, and I would be more than happy to read all the way through your super in-depth geeky post about whatever thing it is that you’re interested in.