I get asked, occasionally, why this exists as a plain website instead of a newsletter or a social account, and the honest answer is duller than the principled one people expect. It isn’t a stand against platforms as such. It’s that a newsletter makes every post an interruption I’m choosing to send to someone, which changes what I’m willing to write — you don’t interrupt someone for a 200-word note the way you’re happy to leave one lying around for whoever wanders past. And a social account rewards the wrong length; the format is generous to a single good line and punishing to the second paragraph that complicates it.
A website with an address just sits there. Nobody is interrupted by a post existing; they find it or they don’t, on their schedule rather than mine. That passivity is the whole feature. It lets a 200-word note and a 2000-word essay live on the same site without either one having to apologize for its length to fit a format built around a different one.
There’s a smaller, more specific reason too, related to this note: a platform post disappears into a feed with no memory of its own. A page on a website can be linked to, cited, revised, and — see the commonplace map itself — connected to other pages in a way that actually persists and accumulates instead of scrolling away under the next hundred posts.