I have decided to participate in a writing challenge called 100 Days To Offload. The challenge is fairy straightforward: to write a hundred articles on a personal blog within a timespan of 365 days. I first read about this challenge on Mastodon and I immediately realised it would be a perfect opportunity to make my personal website more dynamic and to utilise some of ideas for articles I have been putting away for too long.

In the era of walled gardens the vast majority of information is shared via closed social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter X, where only people having an account are able to access published content. They are virtually always subject to ad targeting and profiling, not to mention giving platform provider some rights to their content, as mentioned in terms of service. It deepens the issue with internet being more and more commercial and dwindling open access to interesting articles, blog entires, photographs produced by private individuals. In the early days of internet people were sharing their knowledge, experience, thoughts and opinions via personal websites, blogs, discussion boards and forums. Readers were usually not required to have an account in order to access entries shared by others. Over the last two decades the landscape of internet has shifted dramatically, which endangers the persistence and accessibility of information. This is why initiatives like 100 Days to Offload are needed. They help to enrich the personal, unrestricted and non-commercial part of the internet, the part which is not focused on maximising the engagement to generate profit, but instead relies on authenticity and sharing information with others.

I am curious about how will this challenge go for me. Writing a hundred articles in a year means posting one article every 3.6 days on average. I do not aim at publishing at constant time intervals, though. Depending on what I have to say, I may post daily for some period of time followed by a break. I have an entire year to figure out the optimal solution.

This is article no. 1 from the 100 Days To Offload series.