- Blogs are mostly prefab houses with HOA-approved lawns, when **what we need is more urban gardening**. - I started thinking about this when reading [[Appleton, Maggie - 2020 - A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden]] One of the things she writes about is how unique the internet used to be, and how personalized each corner of the web could be. Now, we're all working off the same Wordpress themes to make everything as marketable as possible. Our blogs aren't our stories or thoughts or ideas; they're an SEO-optimized version of ourselves -- our [[{7a1} social media is the decontextualization of our identities and the curation of situational personality|Personal Brand]] (There's something to be said here about the [[commodification of everything]] as a concept.) - It feels like the Big Sites are each little developments... Facebook, Twitter, these are different neighborhoods, built by the same area developers. Each house is the same. Each lawn is HOA-approved. There's no wiggle room. Our personal sites might exist in a different neighborhood; one with historic housing or architecture unique to our areas. But rather than embracing those individualities, we strip these homes of everything that gives them character, only to throw the same neutral Sherwin-Williams paint on the exterior... Maybe there's something here about [[the beigeification of everything]], too... - [[2024-12-20]] [[there are just so damn many of us out there trying to be unique]] - [[2025-04-25]] is this related to [[{3.1} algorithmic monoculture]]?