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Public vs. Private Journals

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Inkerlink:
For those that journal out there, do you prefer to keep your journal private or public? Or maybe you have one private and one public? What are the advantages and disadvantages of both? What's your reason for choosing one over the other? Which one feels the best to you? Can you really be yourself with a public journal? Is keeping a private journal too stifling?
At the moment, I keep one private journal that I update when I feel the need to. The journal is mostly a stream of consciousness, with no edits. I find that it offers mild relief to any emotional turmoil I'm feeling at the time. Although sometimes it seems to only amplify my feelings rather then satisfy them. I chose to make it private since I wanted the journal to focus entirely on myself, and to try and make the most 'true' journal as possible. I feel like if I made a public one I'd worry too much about presentation and what people would think of me. I'm 100% certain that if my private journal was public, it would be extremely hard for an outsider to parse any meaning from it, and I don't feel like it provides any meaningful experience to anyone else besides me.
I currently maintain a journal using the free open source program Cherrytree. I like it since it supports password protected files and encryption, alongside supporting nested entries called 'nodes'. It makes organization very easy.
I wouldn't call it a journal per-se, but I do publish 'blips' on my personal website which are just non-Twitter tweets, basically. That's really the only forward facing presence of my thoughts or feelings on the internet currently.
In the past, I did maintain a public journal on livejournal.com when I was in grade school, but I stopped writing in that one after a while. Back then I would tell myself I wrote in it for my own personal reasons, but many years later I see I was just trying to present an image to other people, in order to get attention from those I cared for. I don't think it was particularly healthy for me.

Let me know what you think!

j:
i like to have both!

i'm old fashioned in that i like to keep a paper diary in a little hardback book (where i tend to switch between languages and scripts either for obfuscation or for effect), though i also have a little digital (opinionated) blog where i talk about stuff that's either personal to me or that i want to share with other folks that stumble across my page!!

cherrytree looks pretty cool, and similar to what i'd go for if i worked with GUIs mostly!!! as it happens, i like to write my blog posts in markdown and then convert via the command line to html pages using pandoc, something i incidentally cover more in one of my blog posts ;)

interesting to hear the differences in what we all refer to our musings as. in my head, "blogging" is very much a digital activity where a journal is something i'd expect to find in a museum. nice bit of linguistics there :D

teatime:
i've never really kept a private journal but i think it could be a good point of self-reflection. as for the public journal on my site, i don't actually call it a journal :P i refer to it as "articles" likely because i saw some other neocities page use it, and i also refer to them as blog posts. the two i have posted are like very casual little posts, and one is a kind of life update, but i also want to post some longer form stuff about random stuff like movies or whatever :ok: posting blogs/articles feels a hell of a lot less stressful than twitter or even tumblr because on those platforms i'm worried both about my posts being seen (by a lot of people) and my posts needing to be seen. with a personal website, people will just stumble upon my blogs if they find my website, and i have no way of knowing that unless they tell me about it. ignorance is bliss!


--- Quote from: Dodge2667 on March 13, 2023 @813.72 ---interesting to hear the differences in what we all refer to our musings as. in my head, "blogging" is very much a digital activity where a journal is something i'd expect to find in a museum. nice bit of linguistics there :D

--- End quote ---

to me, blogging is also a pretty casual digital activity. a journal can be digital or physical, it can be formal or informal, and it can be public or private. you could have a journal that's basically a diary, or a journal that's documentation of plants or animals! the word "journal" also reminds me of bullet journaling, which is less about writing and more about planning  :dive:

kandeez:
i tend to keep a more private journal, i mean private in the sense that i don't openly post entries anywhere. but it's always on my bedside and sometimes i'll reread stuff and send a picture of what i wrote to friends to either question what i was on about that day or share it for more personal reasons. other then selectively sharing what i write in it i don't think i'd be the happiest if someone went and read through everything written in there.
when it comes to public journaling i used to have an instagram page where close friends and then some random people i barely ever interacted with would follow me and i would post these long captions of me pretty much screaming into the void about anything and everything. i don't use that account anymore, but i do have a twitter that no one follows me on and sometimes if i'm out or a thought is too big for the journal to hold on to for me i'll post on that account. it feels like what i write there isn't meaningless because there is always a chance others will see it, but with all the algorithms and stuff on the internet i know no one ever will so it feels less like sharing to an audience.

Cele:
I can't keep a private one. The things I wanna keep private are stuff that I wouldn't want to write down :happy: So might as well have a public one. The only downside I think is if someone wanted to track you down I guess they'd know a bunch of stuff about you and your surroundings. But my experience is that journals don't tend to have that many visitors. I've noticed it actually easier for me to keep posting instead of just stopping if it's a public one. (The amount of times I've tried to write a paper one...)

As for words, I'd actually never use the word journal. Either blog or diary if it's on paper.

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