“god forbid a bitch name his blog whimsically”
i posted that as a joke, but it is also the entire operating theory behind tacobout.online
a personal website should have a name you have to explain. it should contain at least three subjects a growth consultant would beg you to split into separate brands. it should occasionally look like somebody opened a junk drawer and installed an rss feed in it
the vertical is a lie
platforms want a clean answer to “what do you post about?” because clean answers are easier to package. tech account. politics account. reality tv account. music account. gay little pop-culture account. choose a lane, feed the recommendation engine, become legible to the machine
but a person is not a vertical. a person is twenty-seven browser tabs, one of them playing audio from somewhere, three of them technically research, and at least one open because the headline made you mad six hours ago
in the space of two days this site went from Big Brother strategy pathology to an ATProto moderation tool, Geese marketing discourse, krishnacore, and an Avengers multiverse collision. that is not editorial confusion. that is what a brain looks like when nobody has forced it into a content calendar
the camera roll and the blog are cousins
this flower has been sitting in my IMG library for years. it does not have a discourse attached to it. it does not need a hot take, an affiliate link, or a call to action. i liked it enough to save it
that is still one of the best reasons to put anything on the internet
the camera roll says: this happened in front of me and i wanted another look. the personal blog says: this passed through my head and i wanted somewhere it would not immediately disappear. both are ways of refusing the feed’s insistence that whatever is newest is whatever matters
ownership is not the same thing as audience
Bluesky and Mastodon are better than most platforms at letting posts point outward. rss is still sitting there, unbothered and useful, waiting for everybody to remember it never asked an algorithm for permission. open protocols make it possible to build small, nosy tools when a social platform is missing exactly one fact you want to know
that is how i ended up building a client-side ATProto tool for checking which of your mutuals already block an account. sometimes a post explains a thought. sometimes a post has buttons and performs set intersection
none of that makes the domain a fortress. owning a site does not mean pretending the social web is beneath you; it means having a home to return to after visiting everybody else’s apartments
the feeds are where the conversation happens. the site is where the conversation gets furniture
the weird name is the point
there is no conversion funnel here. no promise that every post will reinforce a niche. the same person can care about open protocols, reality-show social strategy, queer pop culture, old songs, labor, games, movies, and whether the kitchen happens to be clean at the same time the pantry is full
that mess is not a failure to brand the self. it is the self
so yes, the blog is named tacobout.online. god forbid a bitch own a weird little corner of the internet and put a whimsical sign over the door