Where to put things?

In the middle of moving my websites around I wonder where to put things. I blog in German on a more “private-and-casual” blog, and I blog more professionally (lol) and in English here. I like to keep the technical stuff on kevin.gimbel.dev to have a “this is professional me” sort of website. At the same time, some “private” topics leak into the “business” topics – like last weeks Weeknotes featuring me and my depression. It’s part of me, and I don’t mind having it in the “business” context of my online persona — I even want it there.

Reading Joni’s Breakfast Letters I felt the urge to explore and write down my thoughts more. I love this sort of personal “I’ve been thinking about X and now I’m having a monologue about it” blogs. I yearn for them! I’ve been kind of isolating myself over the past decade: Working from home and remote, loosing touch to my old school friends, not really going out to find new ones; I’ve become lonely. Twitter filled that gap for a long time, I’ve had my online friends there and loved reading their everyday non-sense little tweets. But it’s gone now. It was already gone before Elon — and it’s certainly no longer a fun and nice platform to connect and have a good time.

So that leaves me with my thoughts and no real place to put them. Tumblr was a lot of fun, but is no longer. Mastodon is not it, as much as I’m rooting for it. Bsky is close, but it’s not it – or I’m just getting too old. Instagram is horrible for me. The algorithm keep putting bullshit into my feeds, and as a Photographer the grind is insane with no reward. So lot of time spent and work put into the platform with little reward (alas I did meet a handful of nice people through our shared interest in photography).

Another problem is language. Do I want to explore my thoughts in English, opening the writing to a broader audience? Or do I want to keep it in German? I don’t blog for views, and I never have. I’m not a content creator, and I’m not trying to grow my audience for the sake of growing it – I want to give interested people a way to follow along on my journey.

So anyway, all this rambling leaves me with two problems:

• I want to share (personal, non-sense) content online
• I want to connect to people with like-minded interests

I haven’t found any single platform which suites my needs well. At the moment I’m blogging in German on my private blog, sharing a mix of “Things I found online and like”, Reviews, Books, and all things that keep me interested.

I blog about Tech stuff on this website, and I also have other stuff which interests me on here (Games I made, Open Source Software I coded, …). Maybe a new “Thoughts” Section on this website could be it, then I can share the links to the networks as I see fit.

Right now I think I’ll move the content from art.atarijunge.de to kevingimbel.de, so I have my photography under my name, and keep the “special pages” like Games and OSS here as well.