Gibberish

I first heard about Gibberish from Pete Brown, and I've been eagerly anticipating the app's release ever since. It's finally in the store; there's an iOS and Mac version, as well as the web interface. Gibberish is a blogging platform. I really wish it was also a text editor.

The conceit is simple: write blog posts the same way you text. Helen Rosner once admitted she wrote her essays this way, except she used a private Twitter account instead. I used to write in private Livejournal entries. Those of us who have been writing online long enough, we've trained ourselves to think in sentences, not paragraphs.

There's something about that text field. The old blog text field was a hard limit, a space-constrained box. Once the top text scrolled out of view, all you could focus on was your current sentence. (The Ghost text field has no borders. It's wide open—almost too open.) Our love of that limitation is why the AlphaSmart is still selling, 17 years after being discontinued.

I hopped on Twitter early because I loved the concept immediately. It was blogging, but it was short. 140 characters. Not words, remember; characters. Spaces included.

(It's been so long, I had forgotten that exact number. I wrote 240, then looked it up because that didn't sound right.)

I'm a notoriously short writer. I've got a novel in a drawer, sure. But dragging it across the finish line of 50k words (maybe I got to 60?) was a chore.

This is why I make zines. This is why Microcosm is such a good fit as my publisher. My email signature still reads, "tiny stories, tiny books." I write tiny. I tried the other way, and it just wasn't me.

So when I discovered Twitter, it felt like I had found my home. This was where my sentences belonged. This is where they shined.

I loved Twitter so much, I asked a programmer friend of mine how easy it would be to copy the interface for my blog. (Not easy, it turns out.)

We all know what happened to Twitter (what's still happening). We all know how our blogs fell to the wayside. We all know how our sentences disappeared (whether into the corporate ether or onto hard drives).

Every time I tried to change, deleted social media apps from my phone, it didn't spur me to blog more. I simply took all those stray thoughts and threw them into private group chats instead. I was still writing, but I wasn't publishing, not for the public, anyway.

I don't need another blog. That was one of the problems of the social media era: feeling spread too thin, never knowing where to post, so never posting at all. I have this blog, here on my own domain name.

I'm gonna play around with Gibberish. I love it as a concept so much. But I don't need another blog.