During my blog maintenance today, I stumbled upon a link to one of my S3 videos from two years ago. These were about 20-30-minute summaries of me going over my posts that week and explaining them in more detail, sort of offering an additional “behind-the-scenes” look. After watching the video, I decided to take all of those videos down.

The main reason for that is that I don’t feel comfortable talking to an audience in front of a camera. I don’t like how I sound, I don’t like the grammatical mistakes I make in speech (they happen more often in videos), and I don’t like all the “umms.” It’s different when I’m recording myself to family or friends, but publically, it feels different.

I write better today than I did two years ago and much better than I wrote five years ago. With recent developments in AI, mostly Grammarly in my case, I also get suggestions for clarity and precision, which help me bring out my ideas better. I prefer to express myself in writing than in speech—I always have—which is why I always had a blog.

Repeating the same things is another reason I would rather not have these videos up. I already write a lot of my thoughts down between this blog and my journal, and rehashing everything again a third time at the end of the week for the sake of having something in video doesn’t change the fact that it’s 90% the same thing.

When and if I do consider doing videos again, they would probably be instructional (like a how-to video) or a recording of a game playthrough. And when this happens, I think I will skip PeerTube altogether.

The server I uploaded my S3 video is shutting down, as the sole person behind it is running out of money and patience to maintain it. The instance I was on was already the third one I tried after two other ones failed on me, and moving large video files around for the sake of a free server somewhere is not worth it. Besides, I don’t like the fact that PeerTube, as awesome as it is, is just a recycled YouTube idea (classic YouTube, but still YouTube). There’s a lack of innovation in all these federated services, which build a copycat version of the proprietary platforms, be it Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. But that’s mostly just my grump.

In any case, I’m back here ranting as usual, still adding pieces from my old blog and my journal from time to time.