Digital Ghosts
When digital footprints fade to static.
I've been thinking about simpler online times lately. Not just pre-Twitter or pre-Facebook, but the golden age of blogging—2002 to 2007. Back when we wrote for ourselves and each other, without metrics or engagement scores hanging over our heads. Nostalgia hit hard this week. I found myself revisiting old digital haunts, checking blogs of people I once knew intimately through their words. People I'd crossed the country to share drinks with, whose lives I'd followed through carefully crafted posts and late-night comments.
These weren't just blogs; they were windows into authentic lives. Raw, unfiltered, and refreshingly real. Spelling errors and profanity included, because that's who we were. No polished personal brands or carefully curated content strategies—just people writing about their lives.
But here's the thing about digital archaeology: it often reveals more absences than artifacts. Most of these blogs sit dormant, frozen in time somewhere between 2009 and 2012. Of the ones that haven't completely vanished or gone private, I found exactly one with a post from the past decade. A single post.
Let's pause for a moment to appreciate Blogger. Yes, it's Google's forgotten child, but it persists. Before the era of feature-bloated platforms and over-engineered CMSes, Blogger offered something precious: simplicity. Even now, finding a platform that just lets you write is surprisingly difficult. While I've found my solution in Chyrp Lite, Blogger remains one of the purest options for someone who just wants to start typing.
The Canadian blogging community I remember was tight-knit—a continuous conversation spanning years and provinces. Now those voices are silent. Some final posts mention new domains (long dead), others acknowledge extended absences (never to return), and many simply... stop. Like abandoned Facebook profiles, they exist in digital limbo, neither alive nor quite dead.
I went looking for traces of myself too, but came up short. Between my own efforts to erase a former digital life and time's natural erosion, those old stories—full of cigarettes, whiskey, and self-deprecation—have largely vanished. Maybe that's for the best.
What I miss most isn't the platform or even the specific people—it's the honesty. We wrote ourselves into existence, sharing local stories that somehow formed a national community. Today's blogs often feel like performances, each post carefully aligned with some greater purpose or brand. Back then, blogging was simply an extension of self, digital amplification of who we really were.
I'm not sure what I hoped to find in this digital archeological dig. Maybe glimpses of my former self, or pictures of those almost-close connections from before the world shrank into our phones. Whatever I was searching for remains elusive, lost in the digital ether of abandoned domains and expired hosting plans.