I Want Back Into the Forest (why I am ditching platforms)

Happy Halloween. I have decided I want to scamper off into the woods

For 2025, I want to return to the internet of old—away from the walled gardens of the last few years of my life. Instead, I want to turn to flexibility and control of my work outside of the increasingly stringent demands of the various platforms competing for my time. I’m getting older, and I don’t feel the urge to compete for attention, nor am I feeling the demanding presence of websites that make promises that never quite deliver for me because I cannot devote myself to them fully.

I am writing this as I am set to write my final essay for the 31 Days of Halloween essay project that I took on spontaneously this month. For the project, I decided to dust off my virtually abandoned Medium account and published an essay about a horror film, every day, for 30 days straight – 31 later tonight.

Despite publishing every day, the platform’s promise of discoverability and marketing as a place for writers hasn’t resulted in much exposure for me. The project’s intent wasn’t necessarily about building an audience; I am coping unhealthily with a few months of creative draught and my primary goal was to kickstart my composition habits.

In that regard, the kickstarting was a huge success. I have enough work for a book now, an unintended consequence of the volume of writing, but the lack of engagement through the platform was striking.

Medium to Minor Results

Allow me to be transparent about this. As of 1 pm on October 31st, 2024, here is where my engagement currently stands for the month.

Again, while the primary aim of this project was just to shake off the cobwebs and begin writing again, something feels off. Sure it is more engagement of my work than I would have had, had I not taken on the project. Simply having written something gives it a chance to be seen. But it also seems remarkably low for a month of daily engagement.

The reasoning for the lack of engagement could be any number of things, of course; I may not write very well, or my niche is too narrow (ironic that there are a lot of elder millennials obsessed with horror publishing content about the genre). Perhaps my takes on the horror movies were particularly offensive and scared potential readers off.

I’m not here to gripe. I am just explaining my desire to just retreat from this world of platforms.

Medium is just one of many platforms I looked at. I had also considered launching a Substack, but the more I investigated these online publishing ecosystems the less interesting they became to me. Every platform required more engagement than I felt I was ready to put in. I even began rethinking my use of Wattpad for my fiction. The tools were useful but weren’t doing me any favors, and I would feel anxious about keeping up with the users there.

The existing nature of these platforms encourages time sinks, competition, and to a degree, addiction. I already feel overwhelmed by a desire to compete on Medium over the month, and I don’t like it. I choose to not compete, or more to the point, compete on my terms.

So, I am disengaging from the walled gardens.

Welcome to the Woods

For the weekly podcast, I do with my friends, Supernatural Selection, in the third episode I wrote regarding the Dead Internet Theory, I pursued a thread of discourse emergent around a dark forest theory of the internet. At one point, I wrote this:

Instinctively and culturally, we as internet users recognize the growing threat and toxicity of the mainstream web, and we’re retreating to the undergrowth of our dedicated apps. Hell, we’re recording right now through a Discord chat, that sprung from a dedicated Discord channel for our show, where we and like-minded users have found relative safety in isolation from the larger web. Discord is a rotting, hollowed-out stump in the dark forest.

Earlier in the series my co-hosts and I opined for the older era of the internet, the wilderness of the 1990s. I think my desire to retreat to a dedicated blog in 2025, disconnected from companies and the broader content-centered core of the modern internet, is a desire to recapture a bit of that wilderness.

I do acknowledge that I am using WordPress. WordPress is a massive company in the online publishing space, but it also has proven a convenient set of tools to do what I want, on my terms. They’re not sponsoring me or anything, I just want to be upfront that I recognize the contradiction of saying I am moving from the mainstream internet while using one of its most frequently used tools.

So what is it that I want to do? What are my terms?

As far as my purpose for moving into a dedicated website for my writing, three things come to mind; the first is to have a centralized location where you can find my writing.

I do not want to abandon those platforms and pull my existing writing for them – they are valuable markers for my presence on the internet and I know that they will bring a wanderer into my orbit from time to time. Those aren’t going anywhere. However, future writing will emerge here. As for the older work, you can find those links under Publications. Ideally, you will just visit hpkomics.com for all information regarding me and my work. This blog is under that label, sections off just enough to contain things a bit.

My second purpose is to write more. Writing every day was a huge help to me and I feel good about it. I want to keep that feeling going – just not as intensely as over the course of the previous month. I also want to utilize a more flexible space for writing, where I can write what I want, organize it how I wish, and include the various embeds, images, and drawings that inevitably fall into my work.

My third purpose is to control my data, and messaging, and eliminate fees associated with platforms. I have the webspace, why not use it? I have written a lot of SEO content, so why not use those skills?

So, that is where I am at – surrounded the the scrappy trees of a wilder, less tame internet. It’s time to carve out my space.

Also, pardon the sticks. I’m building, here.

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Featured image by Joe from Pixabay