I’m Blogging Now, I Guess

I didn’t start this blog to publish text that readers enjoy reading. In fact, I didn’t have any idea how one would even do that. All I wanted was to find a place where I could keep people updated about my endeavors—the apps that I’m building, the music I am working on, and all the other projects waiting to be completed—confidently assuming anyone would care about any of them.

Initially, I didn’t even consider writing long blog posts. For the sake of allowing curious people to follow my work, microblogging seemed good enough. The short format would happily conceal my lack of writing skills, so I thought. And since Twitter in 2026 just is what it is (X), I took a look at platforms like Threads, BlueSky and Mastodon. While I had trouble finding my crowd on the latter two, I was captivated by the creativity up on display on Threads: beautifully designed apps, drawings I had a hard time believing were even possible by hand, photography that for some reason looked more professional than anything I ever shot, and all the other art forms I didn’t even know existed.

Being exposed to all this incredible work also posed a problem, though. By now, everybody knows that comparing yourself to others is bad for your mental health. And I had painfully experienced this many times before. Unfortunately, none of that prevented me from doing it anyway. I had to promise myself to only log in with a countdown set to 10 minutes in order to develop a healthy relationship with the platform and prevent further sprees of endless scrolling, by the end of which I always felt like an empty shell, without any trace of a personality, entirely incapable of adding anything of interest to this world.

A few days later I had basically settled on Threads. I had even been able to come up with first posts myself that seemed to fit the format. But then, all of a sudden, my account was locked. The screen I was shown made it sound like Meta was horribly concerned for their users’ safety and asked for my understanding in their efforts to protect them. It said that, in order to continue to use Threads, I was required not only to provide my phone number—which wouldn’t have been that surprising—but on top of that, to submit a recording of my face.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I would absolutely respect it if a company attempted to keep their social platform free from bots and protect users and basically society as a whole from the—sometimes more, sometimes less—malicious agendas behind them. And I also understand that such efforts come at a cost. However, that respect is really reserved for companies whose intentions I trust. In stark contrast, Meta’s demeanor resembled that of a drug dealer. They had gotten me addicted to their product and were now squeezing me for what they needed to make money: my data. I can’t say I’ve always stood up for myself when I should have in life. But in this case, I didn’t hesitate to close the page and be done with it. Besides, honestly, that 10-minute timer strategy never actually worked anyway.

After that run-in with corporate social networks, I continued my search, focusing on solutions where I wouldn’t be at any company’s mercy. I was soon drawn to the idea of hosting my content myself, on my own server to be entirely independent. I wanted people to be able to subscribe simply with their email address and that way receive any updates directly, without a middle man. I eventually stumbled across the Ghost blogging platform. For those who don’t know, that’s publicly available code you can run on your own server, providing not only a way for your visitors to read your blog posts, but also an admin area only accessible by the owner, allowing them to compose and publish new ones. And since I was already renting a server for my other projects anyway, I was quickly sold on giving that a try.

Discovering A New Passion

Having spent the afternoon setting up the blog, I was now sitting in front of the "Posts" section in the admin area. I stared at the example post and pictured what it would be like to have published an actual story. I was fascinated by the idea that anyone with a connection to the internet could see this post, hosted on my own server. I felt excitement rising. An urgency to tell the world that I exist, too. I even started playing with the idea of getting out and experiencing something new, talking to someone I wouldn’t normally have talked to, or going places I have never been, just to write about it. This was a blank canvas where I could paint whatever it was I thought I needed to show. And somehow, despite it being one-way communication, it felt like this might be a gateway to the world I hadn’t found before.

Later that day—I was just lugging home some groceries—I suddenly had an idea for what my first post could be about: a habit I have formed over the years, where I start a new music playlist any time I feel like a chapter of my life has come to an end and a new one begins, with each one usually spanning a couple of months. I had just transitioned from one chapter to the next and was therefore excited to show off my favorite tracks from the recently closed playlist and talk about the changes they accompanied—the good and the bad. And so, as soon as I got home and shoved the perishables into the fridge and freezer, I returned to the "Posts" page, clicked on the "New post" button and started to write.

The next few hours flew by. I missed dinner. Then bedtime. I was captivated, the same way I was when I first discovered other passions of mine, like producing music or coding programs. As I was writing, my mind went into overdrive and came up with even more ideas for even more topics I could write about. I kept jumping from one to the next, afraid I could forget about an idea if I didn’t jot it down right away. When I finally surfaced, I had amassed dozens of drafts of varying degrees of completion.

The next day, having salvaged what sleep I could, I revisited the editor and opened that first post again. It was total chaos. An endless accumulation of way-too-private events that had happened in my life, needlessly detailed descriptions of projects I had worked on, topped with an in-depth analysis of what was wrong with the current state of the world. Unpublishable.

Luckily, though, I could identify individual ideas I liked, scattered throughout the haystack. And so it wasn’t long before I decided to pick one of those up and start over—this time making sure not to stray too far from the specific idea I started out with. And, indeed, the draft I came up with this time established a reasonable outline resembling that of an actual, kind-of-professional blog post. It still needed a few revisions (I lost count, to be honest). But then, a couple of weeks later, during which I got a sense of what it actually means to write something that is more than a mere transmission of information, I eventually ended up here: concluding the story of how I accidentally started blogging.

By The Way

Since this is the first post I am actually gonna publish, I want to take a moment to introduce myself. I am Baby Death Roll. I love creating—whether it’s apps, music, fashion, or anything else that captures my curiosity. I love iterating over things endlessly, just to throw it all away and start over, until I find something that actually means something (to myself, at least). This blog—and writing in general—is fairly new to me. But I can already tell that it’s exciting enough to try out more than just updates on the projects I am working on. Time will tell what kind of content I’ll eventually end up publishing.

Last but not least, shout out to the team behind Ghost, who provide their blogging software for free to self-hosters like me. Thank you. It’s beautiful.