Why blog?

Why, in the year of (y)our lord 2025, would I start blogging again?

I certainly don’t have time. And my website should be self-hosted, or something. And I post on Bluesky enough. There’s LinkedIn. And don’t I have other things to do? Like run Germ Network or something?

Spoiler: I don’t know yet. Montaigne said we write essays to figure things out. This is my first post because it’s where I’m discovering why I’m here. Hate to tell you, but writing is a tool of thinking–and like the rest of us, I’m figuring this life out as it goes along.

So here’s what I’ve got so far, what’s been turning around for a few weeks--which by writing about, attending to, I allow to grow legs, structure, logic.

Why blog?

First of all, for me, writing prose is like exercise, or how people who exercise talk about exercising. It’s what I do, it’s part of who I am. I’m nicer, calmer, and happier when I do it. It’s the foundation of my stable adulthood, it’s been part of my daily intellectual practice and just lifestyle since I was an undergraduate creative writing student, it’s just what I do, every day. I’m a writer.

(Except it hasn’t been, for a bit. Longtime friends ask me a lot: Don’t you miss writing? And I give them a cheeky answer in new literacy studies : I write all the time! I write memos, emails, decks, Bluesky posts, Figma comments. And yes, that is writing, but it isn’t prose writing, and it’s true that something is missing for me. So here I am.)

Second, skeeting—yes, that’s really what they call Bluesky posting, aka microblogging on the AT Protocol —isn’t great for me . It’s not a sustained expression of thought, and saying things half-way, always sideways referencing my own more-fully-formed internal monologue, isn’t a good look, or so I suspect. I’m self-censored, yet desperate to express, and the resulting tone isn’t how I want to talk to you. I don’t know what you think of my Bluesky/formerly known as Twitter persona, but posting without a long-form writing practice underneath it is feeling compulsive and giving me anxiety. I feel sarcastic, glib, incomplete, and like I’ve said too much but also never enough. Blogging feels like a way to take the time to actually say what I mean, give myself time to think about what I want to say and how I want to express myself, and then do so. Microposting feels like a race I’m always going to lose. Long-form writing is a nice long walk when I have time.

Third, as the CEO of a startup, my job is to tell people about it. But in today’s world that means posting–on Bluesky, sure, but also on LinkedIn, on Germ’s blog, even on Tiktok. I’m trying to write more for LinkedIn but I swear it’s like plugging a power cord into my navel. I’m grimacing as I even think of it. It’s soul crushing. Sorry if you got directed here from LinkedIn, lmao. Because the irony is, this blog is going to help me post there more. But I have to give myself space to think the full thoughts before I extract them into shareable, inspirational bites. Trying to write for that medium for its own sake is simply a creative non-starter for me. I’m not a content creator–I’m a writer.

Fourth, the whole thing about owning the content I produce. I started auto-deleting my skeets, because I always feel like my random thoughts are a liability, and publishing these days (which includes posting, especially on an all-public platform) is just assembling keywords for them to find you and kill you for. Part of writing in this moment is seeing what I allow myself to say. Because I believe very deeply–it is core to the work of Germ–that we are in a lot of danger. Part of owning your data is being able to delete it, or maintain some access management capabilities. Of course if something is published online you can’t delete archived copies, but if a website is down that changes access to it for sure. People could always save copies of things you shared, but that used to be the exception more than the rule with web publishing–you were your own webmaster and your pages could change. Now continuous and comprehensive archiving is the assumption and much of it is considered to be malicious. So let me at least own my own archive. Ownership is about privacy, autonomy, control. In fact, ownership of my documents is part of what got me into privacy tech in the first place. That’s a prompt for another post. But let me stay here a moment longer.

Do I own this site you’re on right now? Let’s explore.

When I first started drafting this post, I thought I’d be blogging on my website tessarbrown.com , which I’ve hosted through Wordpress for years. Although I’m not diving in full-bore, blogging again at this time of my life is an opportunity to think more about self-hosting and what digital ownership means to me.

Ultimately, I decided to publish this blog on Leaflet, a publishing service built on the decentralized ATProtocol. This Leaflet blog is connected to my ATProtocol account–the cryptographically signed handle I use to sign into Bluesky and all the apps on ATProto. That handle is tied to the germnetwork.com domain, but doesn't depend on it--more on this below.

[I’m doing my best here. If this section is interesting to you, definitely read this post about ownership, atproto and open social by Dan Abramov.]

When I started blogging and teaching with blogs over 15 years ago, I was a writer, academic, and educator who cared about self-publishing tools to empower myself, my students, and my communities to amplify our voices. The corporate consolidation and ironic fragmenting of the web since then into an array of algorithmic hellholes is what led me into founding my own social communication platform, Germ Network, a private messaging service. Add the vision of my cofounder Mark to the mix and I’m now the CEO of a company that builds local-first, end-to-end encrypted systems–a paragon of true digital ownership where data you produce in our app lives exclusively on your own phone in your pocket or your purse until you share it with exactly who you intend to. Germ’s technology bridges my interest in the privacy of my own documents and in the social dimension of access control when interacting with me and my information. In end-to-end encrypted systems, the first end is yourself. So in some ways E2EE reflects an access control model where you start alone and are able to permission and revoke individual others’ access to channels and documents you control. It's an extreme model where access can be fragile because ownership is complete--but Mark's experience at Apple shows it can be done elegantly and usably, at scale.

Recently, Germ integrated our app with Bluesky’s open social AT Protocol, a service which promises that you “own your data” by storing it in a “personal data server” that you can easily move from Bluesky’s hosting services to another one. I would suggest that this is a less pure definition of ownership than the local ownership of the profile data you write into and store in the Germ DM app on your phone. But from what I gather, these multiple definitions of data ownership are being contested and explored across technological movements in web3, local-first software, open social protocols, p2p, and end-to-end encryption, and it’s all very good and very cool, and at Germ we have our own perspective, and this blog is me doing something different on the side.

The last few years of my life have been a rapid education in computer science, with the door to the tunnel being the simple desire to publish on the internet and talk to my friends with some autonomy. My first Wordpress blogs used the .wordpress.com domain–so you could say I was simply uploading posts and pages to someone else’s website. Shoutout my Uncle David, who bought my siblings’ and my domain names in the early 2000s, maybe even the 90s, and just sat on them until I had him transfer ownership of tessarbrown.com to me in the 2010s sometime. But that domain was purchased through a domain registry service and the hosting–that is, the management of cloud servers that physically hold my files–was done by Wordpress. Now I hang out with people who self-host, meaning that they might actually have a computer in their house that is hosting their data, or maybe they’re participating in a more resilient, distributed form of self-hosting that will keep their stuff online if the power in their neighborhood goes out. That would be closer to the ATProto model of “ownership” – you control and can never lose access to your own data (right, Paul? Right? ), but some really cool distributed systems help make sure that the people you’re trying to share with won’t lose access, either. So let me wrap this section up by saying there are lots of interesting questions about what “data ownership” really means, especially when you’re pushing things onto the internet where other people can access them, and my blogging again is an opportunity to explore those questions, knowing there is so singular answer to them, only a range of options, tradeoffs, and implications.

That was a lot. We were talking about reason #4 for blogging, ownership. Really, read Dan’s post . But I’m done now. Almost. Because–

Side note–-call it point 4(b)-- [and side-side note what is going on with m-dashes on this site] ownership is also about organization, about license to curate. When I own my files, I can sort them, I can label them, I can set them up for my own easy access. When I think about putting energy into writing again, the issue with using e.g., LinkedIn as a primary publishing outlet is not just about the question of what would happen if I got blocked from LinkedIn or (I don’t think this is likely) the whole service went down, but also about the ease with which I can access and manage my own files. What am I going to do with a bunch of LinkedIn posts? It’s not a real content management system (a CMS–like the administrative part of a Wordpress blog). I can’t even see a list of my posts, let alone export them, retitle them, or change their metadata, and certainly can't change the visual layout of how they are presented. I have to scroll through them like you do, and I don’t think I can retain unpublished archives of them, like I even can with my Instagram posts.

Actually I’m not sure I can manage posts at this level on Leaflet, besides changing how my publication looks. Hashtag #featurerequest. The thing is, while Wordpress is becoming a service that’s managed increasingly erratically and where I have decreasing trust, I know and trust the guys shipping Leaflet and by using this tool I can also notice what I am missing as a self-publisher and take an active role in sharing feedback with them and shaping the future of their product, and of publishing on ATProto. That feeling has been one of the coolest parts of joining an open-source development community for the first time, and as someone with a lot of opinions, it’s been a blast.

So anyway. Easy ways to manage my posts. Part of ownership. That concludes point 4.

But most utterly–call it reason #5– I just want to write more, have wanted to lately, and when it comes to writing if I want to write it I have to, I simply will write it, because that’s what being a writer and once upon a time an artist is and was and I hope forever will be. And I have a pile of essay fragments from the last couple years that died in the rigamarole of trying to pitch them to publications which–the clout and distribution are cool but like, I really don’t care. I’m not trying to make a living as a writer anymore, I have a startup and I don’t need the bylines–I just need to get these words out.

There’s a lot I need to communicate on Germ’s behalf, but it is in a very narrow band of topic and tone. And a couple years into doing so I have a backlog of thoughts and feelings to share that yes I can journal but communication is about getting it to you, too, and seeing what these words look like when I actually know you’ll see them.

It’s important for me to remember my voice and articulate my thoughts outside of speaking for Germ, so that when I do speak explicitly for Germ it’s with total clarity, not distracted by a 1300-word essay on Love Island and Surveillance Culture that’s chewing up real estate in my frontal lobe. I could claim that I deserve this, to communicate for myself only, but the fact is that Germ is my life now and still constrains what I can publish anywhere. But that’s ok, it’s the best thing ever actually because Germ is the culmination of everything I’ve ever done and learned, but I can still hold space for myself as an individual to process the parts of what I have to share that don’t fit neatly under the aegis of Germ's mission and voice, even if they are accountable to my role there.

(Of course the fact that I’m publishing under what is technically a germnetwork.com domain shows how brittle that separation is… and I could make the effort to publish under my tessarbrown.com domain, or even set up a separate Bluesky/ATproto account for my personal publishing there, and part of the threat model there would be that maybe I won’t have access to Germ forever… although part of the promise of ATProto is that I’ll still be able to control the permanent identifier (yes, the DID, the DID!) underneath @tessa.germnetwork.com if I needed to reclaim it from Germ, so that is important, but also…I am ok with this entanglement, to a point, or at least for now. Because what I’m really doing here is sandboxing my thoughts and ideas in ways that ultimately will serve Germ, because all of my speech serves Germ now, or works against it if I do it wrong, like the famous founders with carefully manicured snippets of their personal lives on public Instagram accounts pretending it’s just spontaneous snapshots of their vacations with their families, but it never is. And I don’t want to share snapshots of my family, but I do want to share what I’m thinking. So here we are.)

Anyway, shoutout writing, I love you dawg, you got me here, and you’ll take me where I’m going next.

And shoutout my first blog Hiphopocracy, a testimony from another chapter and another life when I was figuring out how to be an adult, an educator, a graduate student, an academic, a responsible white person in this country, what this country was, what the nature of our citizenship was, and what I could do with it. In fact I took the site down, I think only this past year, as things heated up with Germ, because you don’t need to read all that anymore. It was, like this is, an expression of a need to understand, which involved sharing at the time, but in my estimation has served its purpose. And per the above, while it may be archived somewhere against my explicit consent, I retained some access control over it, and I chose to unpublish it, and let it continue to live privately in my Wordpress account. Which maybe I want to backup further somehow, and own it even more. (Like what if M*** M******** reads this and gets mad at me? Then what?) I’ve been privileged to publish edited essays and fiction and peer-reviewed research which I still point to on my personal website, because even as our information ecosystem gets more repressive I feel ok with facilitating you finding things that were published with the intention of permanence and with accountability to collaborators. And of course, my other website is germnetwork.com (bumper sticker idea), and let me not tumble again into the question of whether this website itself is on germnetwork.com . I just said it wasn’t. This is published to my PDS, which simply points to Germ’s site. And don’t forget Germ DM where I publish my tiniest publications, the ones I write for just one person at a time, or even just for myself. Because that’s where everything starts.

So anyway, this is my blog, I’ll be blogging now, thank you for reading, stay tuned. I'm really glad to be here.

P.S., or call it a Coda: Writing this essay, dreaming of it and then revising it over several weeks, feeling how the work of editing extends and clarifies thought, thinking of my new frienemies Chat and Claude, neither of whom were consulted in any way in the composition of this essay, feeling concepts and clauses slide past each other in my mind like granite blocks, or steel gears clicking into place, feeling smart, strong, of sound mind and rational faculties, I recall what the invention of writing did for the Greeks, writing the dangerous progenitor of argument ( Phaedrus reference), and I marvel at this mighty feeling that yes, this is Writing, that singular technology of human cognition, and I need it more than ever. Use it or lose it, to be succinct.

See you soon. [winky face]