Do people IRL know you have a blog?

Yet another non usual technical blog post today… But something I have been thinking about for a few weeks… So I thought that writing it here might get it out of my system (and maybe raise intersting responses). Maybe with the reply july challenge (even though I’m not officially participating), I’ll get some interesting feedback :).

A couple of months ago, I was eating in a restaurant with my life partner (almost for 14 years now), and during the discussion, the topic of “old” blog / personal website in the early days of the internet was discussed. Probably a deviation of one of my usual rant about personal data and the state of the current web. Anyway, at some point she said that these sites have been replaced by social media and that they don’t really exists anymore.

I replied something like: “of course they still exist, even I still have my own blog. And many people still prefer writing what they want on a platform that is theirs”. I’m not going to summarized our discussion, because I simply don’t remember, but what was interesting to me was:

• She never search for “bacardi55” (she has known for a long time that it is my online username) to see what would be found, even though she already search for her name/lastname and mine;
• I’ve never told her before I had a blog, even though I told her all about the manga related website I used to run (she is also a manga fan, which is a good thing knowing the place the 1600+ volumes take in our appartment…)

I’m not sure why I’ve never talked about it, but most probably a mix of good and bad reasons (eg: shyness, “this is my garden”, she isn’t interested in tech at all, etc…). So I ended up showing her as she asked for it. After the surprise of the colors used in dark mode theme (mainly influenced by the dracula colorscheme), she was geniunely “impressed”, mainly because I wrote here in (approximative) English while this is not our native language. But after a quick look around, she quickly understood that this blog contains mostly articles that she couldn’t understand or wouldn’t be interested in. Indeed, she is not a tech nerd, more the opposite as she hates that. As I said, I like it for the both of us :).

But then I asked myself, who, In Real Life, knows that I’m blogging (or gemlogging)? Not counting people I met online first that knew “bacardi55 before <firstname>”, but only the opposite… Well, I think only one of my best friend (and now my partner, but my friend knew before) knows. The main reason he was aware is because I once shared with him a gemlog article I wrote… Not sure which one but not a technical one.

The reality is that noone in my family or very close friends are into tech like me. The closest one (the one that I shared the gemlog with) is interested in tech mostly because of privacy concerns (which is a very good concern). But not into selfhosting or other tech things that I discussed here. I helped him setup a selfhosted email service for some time before he moved to protonmail. But that is the extend it.

I know for a fact that this friend or my partner are not looking at my blog (none of them have RSS reader either). Since that discussion with my partner though, I sometime (very rarely) talked about it. For example, she was very supportive during my data loss nightmare, and I told her when I published the blog post explaining the situation and that I received a few supportive messages. But I also know even if we briefly discussed it, she hasn’t read it.

Would she read this blog more if I were to talk about personal things? I’m not even sure… Because for a lot of people, browsing websites is not part of their workflow. If it doesn’t appear on their IG (or other social media) or sent to them via IM, they won’t look at it. Browsing websites to find things is not popular anymore.

To be clear, I don’t mind my friends and close one not reading it, it is even better so I don’t have that “pressure” or need to justify anything. But that made me wonder how others are approaching this? Is your blog your secret garden that you only share online with stranger and online friends, or is this something you discuss with your entourage? Or, like me, something you shared once or twice but not more than this.

Most of my blog posts are writen late in the day, when she is already asleep so she doesn’t even see me writing them, removing possible imprompted discussions about it. I’m not writing at that time to “hide”, it is just my prefered workflow being a night person. But I’m interested to know how fellow bloggers are approaching this. Not that I want to change the current state, but more to understand how people think about their blog and online presence with IRL people.

Feel free to respond to me via your own blog or other channel from my about page :).