Well, guess what, this blog has officially turned 365 days old, or 12 months old. In any case, let’s talk about it. I’ll admit, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of making another blog, because sooner or later they’d end up abandoned because I could not motivate myself to post. So to think this is the first time I’ve had it last for longer than just a few months is rather impressive to me. I’ll touch on the very reason I started off this blog in the first place, but first…

It all goes back to when I was 15. Back then I had so much going on mentally, I had been diagnosed with depression and I was feeling absolutely terrible inside, and I didn’t have much in the way of social media or anything similar to express myself. So I decided to start off a humble Spanish-speaking blog talking about how I felt and whatever other nonsense I felt like sharing. I don’t remember what it was called and I did away with it a few months later, heck, I don’t think I ever shared it with anybody. I only ever posted like, once or twice at most.

Then in 2016, I made yet another blog, also hosted on Blogspot like the other one I had. Once again, I only ever posted like once or twice, but I do recall sharing my posts on Google+ while that was still up, and I talked about the seasons and I also wrote a whole blog post about someone I had a falling out with… yes, I was that toxic back then. But again, it got deleted sometime in early 2017. Then the final blog I ever made was on a Japanese platform called Hatena Blog in 2019, but like with my previous attempts, this was also short lived and I posted about once or twice. Do you notice a pattern on my blogging attempts?

And that’s why afterwards, I simply didn’t try again, at some point I knew I wouldn’t be able to commit to writing frequently, so instead I focused all my energy on social media. That was the approach I took these past few years, and it’s been a bit of a mixed bag if I’m being honest. And now that it’s become toxic practically everywhere I go, it seemed inevitable that I’d end up making the jump to doing something by myself, free of algorithms and censorship. And why not, I’m actually gonna put some effort into it this time.

So… here we are today, the Purple Palace has had a blog running for a whole year. It sure is an achievement to me. And I gotta say, blogging isn’t easy at all. It’s a bit of a challenge to figure out what to write about, and picking the right words to express myself. It isn’t as easy as simply putting together a bunch of words, it’s also about putting your own twist and personality into the things you write about. Whether or not I’ve succeeded on this is up to you to decide, but I think I’ve done okay overall, despite everything. That said, I’m still really shy about my interests, so that’s why I haven’t posted at all about those more specific things. I do want to remedy that someday, but I’ll have to ease myself into it.

So, let’s talk about the reason why I began this blog. In case you didn’t know, SpaceHey is a social media platform that aims to replicate the 2000s MySpace experience. Being that I was a child when it was popular, you can probably guess that I didn’t use it back then. Around August 2021, a friend of mine let me know about this website, and since I had just ended a friendship that was doing no favors to me, I immediately joined since I saw the opportunity to meet new folks. At first, it was a cool place to be and it wasn’t long before I began to meet some very nice individuals around my age. Up until that point, 2021 had been going rather poorly, but being in there made me feel a bit more at ease.

But it didn’t take long for the cracks to start showing up. Firstly, the moderation. I remember that in early 2022, some very questionable accounts began to show, most notably, a dude who had a literal cock on his profile picture, he came (heh) back a few times. And as the userbase grew into the hundreds of thousands, I imagine that moderating the website must’ve gotten even harder, especially since there were like, 2-3 volunteers looking after everything going on. To their credit, at least they do take action rather quickly. But even still, I can’t say I enjoyed seeing these things very often, it’s rather annoying to pop back in only to see so much gross shit.

My second issue is related to the previous one, and that’s of course, the sheer amount of minors. In the beginning, I didn’t see anywhere near as many, but once I did, man did it get overwhelming. It got so bad that I ended up having to make a blog post urging minors to not add me, and somebody accused me of being a pedophile… yes, for not wanting minors near me. While I don’t mind kids using a platform I use, I feel like they should look through people’s profiles before adding them. But the bigger issue is that they were often the ones who caused trouble, in my later years I saw so many gore and hateful accounts that you couldn’t report because they’d have those buttons hidden or unclickable. And it happened at least a few times a month, for quite a while.

And my third issue has to do with the act of meeting people there, especially later on. It seemed like every time I came across someone who seemed cool, they’d suddenly become inactive not long after. User retention was a big problem for me, they say they have a million users now, but how many of them are actually active? In 2023 especially, I saw quite a few people who seemed excited to meet me, only for them to eventually become inactive and never heard from ever again. I do admit that I did become extremely picky about making friends about these dates, but even then… it was hard to keep people around. Quite frustrating and discouraging, honestly.

All of those issues eventually led me to decide that I didn’t want to use SpaceHey anymore, so on August 18th 2024, I announced that I was gonna delete my account in 10 days from then. I blanked out my profile, set up this blog… and then after that time had elapsed, my account was no more. Normally I have second thoughts about making important decisions like those, but this time I didn’t feel that way. While it was a hard decision to make since it was my most active account by far, I feel like it needed to be done. So no, I don’t regret it one bit. Out of curiousity, I checked out the website again, and it doesn’t seem like much of anything had changed since I left a year ago… so yeah, I think I can now move on from this. And after the deletion, I joined Bluesky, then left and took a different direction for my online presence.

Once again, I’m surprised that I’ve kept this going for as long as I have. I was very hesitant to add a blog to my website, but that final push is what brought me to finally start blogging and actually succeeding… in my eyes, at least. But I want to keep going, assuming my mental capacity allows for it. Blogging is hard, but it’s something I enjoy doing. I like to communicate my feelings, and this certainly helps a lot. Though I do generally avoid getting too personal and I try my best to not overshare.

If there’s one thing I do miss from SpaceHey, is the small audience I had. Sure, I know it was just the same one or two folks, but I liked seeing them comment and then having our little conversations on those comment sections. That kind of engagement, small as it was, is something that’s way harder to maintain when you’re running a self-hosted blog like this one. Regardless, I want to thank everyone who’s been reading my blog, it makes me feel a bit less lonely.

Make sure you follow me on Tumblr for quicker updates and cat pics. Until then though, happy 1st anniversary to my little blog. More posts are coming soon-ish, so stay tuned.

See you all in the next post.