You Don't Have to Blog
Responding to Dan Q's post on blogging expectations, I argue that you don't need to blog at all to participate in the IndieWeb. Your website can be shrines, art, or anything else. A retrospective on the poisonous gamification and commodification of blogging from the early 2000s, and the IndieWeb as a return to original weblogging where the Internet belongs to humans.
t's the final day of July, and I'm in a contemplative mood. Tomorrow begins [Blaugust 2026](https://nerdgirlthoughts.game.blog/2026/07/15/blaugust-2026-is-coming/), a fun event where bloggers are challenged to write 31 blog posts in 31 days.
Will I participate? Well, every month has been Blaugust for me since November 2025, as I've written [at least 23 posts](https://brennan.day/charts/) every month since then. Although I haven't yet had a month where I've successfully blogged every single day, so maybe I will.
What I want to talk about, though, is not blogging. At the start of the month, Dan Q. wrote a great blog post called [You don't have to blog like me](https://danq.me/2026/07/02/you-dont-have-to-blog-like-me/), listing out all the things you don't need to do in order to be a blogger. I sincerely appreciate this post, as I think if you take a look at my own blog you might feel as though quite a few things that Dan lists are requirements.
I want to go a step further, though, and tell you that *you don't need to blog at all*.
If you're on the IndieWeb and you are a webweaver, and have your own site on [NeoCities](https://neocities.org) or [make your own static site generator](https://blog.jsbarretto.com/post/static-site-generator), or use one of the many other tools available, your website does not need a blog. Your website is fully complete with just a couple pages, or [shrines](https://whiteheartrainbowsoul.neocities.org/web_revival_guide/glossary), or [web rings](https://indieweb.org/webring), or [web cliques](https://petrapixel.neocities.org/coding/cliques). Even then, none of those are necessary.
If you're an artist, [share your drawings](https://cara.app/) instead of writing. Put your music on [Faircamp](https://simonrepp.com/faircamp), put your photography on [PixelFed](https://pixelfed.org/), put your video on [PeerTube](https://joinpeertube.org/). None of it needs to be words.
And if you're instead a lurker, if you're somebody that reads the blogs of others and often feel a pressuring heat on the back of your neck because you haven't started your own—I'm here to tell you right now that it's okay if you never do. It doesn't make you any lesser, and it isn't a failing.
I blog because I enjoy writing to an absurd degree—and while I have written often about the benefits of writing (private or public), there are plenty of other things you can be doing with your time instead that might be better for you: meditation, running, spending quality time with the people you love, gardening, prayer, going to the library.
## The Poisonous Gamification of Blogging
As I wrote about in my previous post [on linking better](https://brennan.day/knitting-the-web-we-need-interlinkers/), the act of blogging has existed as long as the public Internet 1.0
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