I think I'm having a creative crisis

I’ve been making stuff™ for the internet for about 20 years. I started by HTML-coding my personal website on GeoCities/Angelfire and, over time, moved to blogging platforms, then to YouTube, then Twitch, then back to YouTube, then back to Twitch, then the Fediverse, and then back to my self-coded webpage. There are a few extra steps in there, but you get the idea.

At the moment, I feel like I’m at a creative crossroads when it comes to making stuff online, and I thought that by typing it out, I might solidify some clarity. Apologies for the self-indulgent post, but for those of you who follow my online stuff, you’re probably used to it.

These days, I’m enjoying creating podcasts with my friends (Ours is the Theory, Space Virgins and Freebooters), rambling videos on Hamish’s PeerTube instance, voice notes and text posts for my website.

And these are just the things I’m particularly excited about. I do sometimes feel like I’ve spread myself a little bit thin. For those who have trouble keeping up - and I imagine that’s just about everyone - I keep a master feed for almost everything I create on my website.

I’ve recently been jumping into the realm of short-form video designed for viewing on mobile devices, which I feel all kinds of conflicted about. On the one hand, taking footage, refining it down to a short, distilled segment, and having it enjoyed by a sizable audience is satisfying; but conversely, it also feels like I’m feeding the cheapest, most harmful hemisphere of contemporary media: the Instagram/TikTok/Snapchat/YouTube Shorts monster. Now, to be clear, I’ve only seriously posted to Instagram and YouTube Shorts during this experimental phase with short-form video, but it’s a part of the internet with a lot of overlap between platforms. In fact, there’s something a little liberating about YouTube not being the only name in town when it comes to online video. TikTok really dethroned a champion there, and it did so without copying YouTube, but by offering a different paradigm. Now YouTube follows TikTok’s style with Shorts, as does Instagram with Reels.

I’ve made short-form videos from clips of podcasts I’m on, and they’ve been doing rather well. A video from Ours is the Theory has reached over 170,000 views in an incredibly short space of time. I don’t like to think I create stuff for the views, but I’d be lying if I said that didn’t entice me somewhat. In my previous blog post, I talked about how I try to use the platforms I create for. It just feels more appropriate to me. But in doing that, I’ve really come to feel that the mainstream short-form media platforms are just a cancer on media and society. Sounds extreme, but it’s truly how I feel.

With that in mind, people I know IRL do enjoy my content, and short-form platforms are a really accessible way for them to enjoy what I make without committing three hours to a podcast.

So much of the content there is rage-bait, trying to ‘dunk’ on someone or a group of people, or some kind of right-wing grift. But it’s not just the outright insidious content that makes me dislike short-form video platforms. It’s the fact that they’re designed to treat content so thoughtlessly: to entertain you for a few seconds without ever letting you absorb anything you’ve watched. It’s media with minimal consideration. The most disposable kind of media.

Now, I’m not saying everything ever made needs to be a refined work of art. I really like the medium of talk radio, livestreams, and lo-fi podcasts; but they still foster a meaningful connection with their audience. They can give you something to think about, make you feel safe with a comfortable voice, or allow you to feel connected to a community. It’s almost conversation, and in that sense I think it holds a great deal of value as a form of media - something that short-form video does not.

So, on the one hand, I feel that short-form video allows me to refine my longer-form content into something more accessible, whilst also harkening back to the old-school days of YouTube and its 10-minute videos. On the other hand, it’s feeding a corporate monster which is poisoning people, fuelling hateful ideologies, and fracturing our society for the sake of corporate profits.

There’s also the ‘punk’ angle to this. One of the things I really like about the Fediverse is that it takes a stand against the corporate bullshit. It offers us a way to take the best parts of what we have and find a way forward free from the oligarchs of today’s corporate internet. It might not have the numbers that the corporate world brings in, but then again, it isn’t trying to lure people in with manipulative tricks and aggressive expansion. It’s just a group of people making stuff on the internet for each other, and that’s kinda everything to me.

Of course, the Fediverse offers its own short-form platform in the shape of Loops, which I’ve been playing around with. It’s good - definitely the least toxic of the platforms - but at this point I really question whether it’s where my heart is.

One of the things that the non-corporate parts of the internet have to contend with is that, because of their less exploitative nature - because they’re not selling your data, trying to get you hooked on hate, or acting as a loss leader to undercut their competition - we have to actually pay for the resources we use. Sometimes that’s crowdfunding, sometimes that’s grants, and sometimes that’s just us stumping up the cash. It’s a world that’s truly ours, but that also comes with something of a bill.

One of the ways Google managed to conquer internet video for so long was that, for many, many years, it was operating at a huge loss whilst offering practically unlimited space for video hosting and impressively high resolutions. The fact that this wasn’t more widely questioned baffles me, because, as we all know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Especially on the internet.

Google spent billions keeping that market held down, with success. Yes, TikTok and Twitch have cut away at its market share, but it’s still the biggest player in town. I will say that, in addition to all this, YouTube offers value in ways that other platforms don’t. There’s a huge library of great video content, spanning decades, available for free. Some of the best stuff I ever watch on a screen is on YouTube, and I absolutely can’t deny that.

I also find YouTube Shorts to be somewhat less insidious than the other short-form platforms. Arguably, that’s because the YouTube algorithm knows me better than the others.

So, when it comes to the Fedi, resources are more of a factor. Audio podcasts and text posts are much more affordable to host than long-form video. Short-form video seems to have something of a place on the Fedi because it’s not eating up as much space - especially if it’s lower resolution. Not everything has to be 4K, as YouTube would have you believe.

Mastodon and other Fedi platforms (not Loops or PeerTube) allow users to delete posts after a set number of days. This can be great for easing the load on servers’ disk space. I will often post a short video directly to the Fedi, only for it to live for a week before being removed. By then, whoever’s about and would want to watch it has seen it, before it goes back into its archive.

But if I’m making short videos for the Fedi, does it need to be vertical video? How does an old-school 4:3 video sound, or even just 16:9, or a 1:1 square?! Because the Fedi’s paradigm is infinitely more fluid, we can play by our own rules.

Perhaps it’s time to start closing up this ramble, but it definitely feels good to get some of this stuff written down. Thank you, dear reader, for putting up with me. If it’s any consolation, every word of this rambling nonsense has been written by yours truly, with no help from LLMs/AI.

Maybe it’s time I worried less about fitting into the corporate template and allowed myself to follow my roots a little more. Writing this down has helped, but I’d love to hear what you think. Genuinely, so feel free to talk to me on the Fedi or drop me an email; contact details are on my website.