Friends… I am completely floored. Yesterday we got both our hundredth and hundred and first sign up for Blaugust 2023. This prompted me to look up what our past numbers looked like. The highest participation year ever was 2018 with 90 blogs. There were a lot of factors going into that, not the least of which was having had a somewhat lowkey 2016 and me needing to entirely take off 2017 for running the event. It created a sense of nostalgia about the event I think, and I had numerous folks track me down and ask me if I was going to run it again. When I brought it back folks seemed to come from out of the woodwork and flock to the event, and until this year we had never really captured that kind of lightning in the bottle.
This year is a similarly odd year in that we are in a state of turmoil when it comes to social media. Blaugust was in large part an event that was started on Twitter and dominated by folks who participated in the event in that manner. With me transplanting myself from Twitter to Mastodon last year, I was admittedly somewhat concerned that the interest just would not be there. What has happened instead is that we have gotten traction with folks who had never even heard of the event before. Over half of the blogs that are participating in Blaugust this year are first-timers. That is really freaking huge, but I guess not super shocking. The fediverse as a platform is way more interested in interaction than Twitter ever was, and the number of random conversations that I have struck up with complete strangers has been massive. Mastodon and the Fediverse as a whole seem to be a platform with lowered barriers and in many ways lowered inhibitions.
If you have a minute I would suggest you pop over to Indiecator the blog run by Magi, and check out his Participant Appreciation Post. On one hand, Magi is a Blaugust success story. If my memory serves me right, he started his blog around the beginning of Blaugust in 2019, signed up as a newbie… got 31 posts in his first year, and is now a rather prolific blogger. Last year he assumed the mantle of Mentor to help out other bloggers and has been aiding significantly this year in trying to keep the roles on the Discord set. However, none of that is why you should go read that blog post. You should read it because he took the time to crawl through every single blog (that had signed up to that point) and write a paragraph talking about them. It is a phenomenal post and does a great job of showing the breadth of folks that we have gathered here.
I get a lot of credit for Blaugust because I happened to be the idiot who rammed Blog and August together and tried to make it a thing. As I have stated before, I wasn’t even the first person to do this. There was a whole Australian Blaugust dating back to 2010 that Leaflocker and Alecat were part of. I will forever be grateful that they joined in my brand of nonsense instead of being cross with me for stepping on their toes. There is a separate version of Blaugust over on the #MTBoSBlaugust hashtag that my wife helped spawn based on ours, and I’ve heard of similar events out there in the aether. I am somewhat shocked at how far this dumb little idea I had back in 2014 has spread. I am deeply humbled that so many of you keep showing up every single year to participate and spend the rest of the year chatting way in the Discord.
If you are seeing a bunch of information about Blaugust flying by, and you have found your way here… there is still plenty of time to sign up and join in this particular brand of nonsense. I would suggest you check out the information post from mid-July outlining everything about the event. It has links to various key things like the Sign-Up Form and explains how you can participate. While I am overwhelmed that we have officially broken the hundred blogs barrier, there is always room for more. Though it might take me a bit longer to tabulate the results this year than it has in past years. We are only eight days into the month and I am already a bit overwhelmed by the participation. I want to give a huge thanks to everyone that is participating this year and everyone who has participated in any year over the last decade. It has been a wild ride and I am thankful to count you all among my friends. This year set a bar that I am not sure we will ever beat again, but if nothing else we are proving that blogging is still a vibrant means of expression.