Four Letters That Make Blogging Complicated: NSFW
When I started this blog, I had a specific idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted to discuss things openly without censoring my voice, including subjects that don’t usually come up around the dinner table. I wanted to journal my life, experiences, sexuality, and desires as a man in the last third of his existence. And I wanted to speak plainly.
It turns out that doing all of that gets complicated once four letters enter the picture: NSFW.
It’s a balancing act. A host might allow your content but restrict its discoverability. You can publish what you want, but getting anyone to find it is another matter. It’s there, but unless someone already has the address, it might as well not be.
So you say, fuck it, I’ll host it myself. But even then, you have to check what your hosting provider allows. Running your own Linux server at home means checking your ISP’s rules, too. What I wanted was a place to write, and suddenly I’m trying to figure out acceptable-use policies and how many layers of someone else’s permission are involved.
This blog has been hosted here on Bear Blog, but it was removed from discovery. Herman explained the decision to me, and I understand it. Understanding it didn’t change the practical problem, though. I was getting next to no traffic. How was anyone supposed to find me?
I started looking for communities on Mastodon where I could share my posts. The ones I looked at often had restrictions on NSFW material, and figuring out where my blog would fit became another chore. Eventually, I found kinkycats.org and began manually sharing links there.
That didn’t accomplish much. What I encountered seemed to be mostly accounts posting AI sexual images or promoting subscriptions to more pictures and videos. There may have been people interested in personal writing, but I wasn’t having much luck finding them.
I tried Bluesky and X, too. A little better, but honestly, much of what I encountered felt similar. Plenty of porn promotion and people looking for something to beat off to. Not much apparent interest in a man writing about aging, desire, independence, and unconventional companionship.
Meanwhile, I removed the explicit images from the blog and hosted them on ImgChest, which has been a great service for that. That gave me a way to keep the images available separately.
The actual breakthrough came from Ben at Bubbles.town. NSFW wasn’t the issue there. Posting frequency was. He explained that Bubbles wanted a moderate pace, averaging no more than one or two posts a day. Once my average dropped below that, he added me.
Winner winner chicken dinner!
Page views increased. I started seeing likes on Bubbles and visits in Bear’s built-in analytics. People were actually finding the writing.
So, for now, I have a home and a system that lets me create content as I see fit without too much inconvenience. That was what I wanted in the first place. I want to write, vent, and actually reach people instead of watching my words disappear into the void.