TL;DR: I started a blog in January 2025. It’s been great and occasionally soul-crushing. I’ve learned some things — Us indie creators should stick together.

Intro

Back in January, a mere boy with a dream, I started up Domain of Many Things with next to zero knowledge about creative writing, front end web design, back end website management, SEO, or social media. I did however have a niche in mind where I have a mega passion, and a love of the Alien films and cassette retro aesthetics.

Somewhat inconveniently, I also had some principles! I’m North of 40 and I try to be one of the good guys. I lived through the start of the internet as a teenager, and the wildly optimistic promise that it came with - free at the point of use, democratised information for all, totally unenshittified. I wanted, and still want to offer a community resource that adheres to those values - I’m not here to exploit some easy money out of people.

That means that whilst this is very much a side-hobby with dreams that it might one day pay for itself, I have absolutely no interest in obnoxious banners or popups, no interest in producing zero effort content churned out by LLMs, and no interest in loading my content with vaguely incorporeal SEO terms so that I might please the ever distant and neglectful Internet Lords at Google and friends.

Mostly, I just want to share my ideas and find some meaning in knowing that maybe I brightened someone’s day.

Initial Expectations

Just Lol. On top of a full time day job as a database engineer, I figured that if I turned out one well thought out article a week, the combination of syndicating it on social media, and organic traffic from search engines would give me a decent number of views. Views which I could convert into newsletter subscribers by offering exclusive freebies, and from that self selecting fan base, maybe even earn some affiliate sales to make this thing self sustainable.

As time went on, I’d build a following on social media accounts like BlueSky and Reddit, and form a community that would keep me motivated and inspired, as well as a ready made audience of folks engaging with, liking, and sharing my content.

Let’s review that shall we?

What’s Gone Well

The Website Is An Asset And A Place to Share My Voice

I’m really happy with the website design, especially since I had to learn everything on the fly. Like I’m actually proud of it.

It feels unique and easy to navigate, and thematically nods towards the cool things I enjoy such as retro futurism, pixel graphics, and of course, Alien!

Additionally, I’m pretty happy that the blog has found it’s voice - it feels genuinely me, warts and all - and in a sea of soulless AI generated content and professionalised corporate speak, here’s to hoping I come across as refreshingly human. A little bit of 2002 in your 2025.

I’ve made new connections

I’ve had the huge satisfaction of being able to use this platform as an excuse to speak to game designers I admire, and lend a voice to passion projects that otherwise do not get the attention that they deserve.

I hope that in time I can reach out to other bloggers and build a sub community with those guys - a place to share ideas and support, and make some new mates. That sounds like it would be cool.

Kind Words Have Made My Day

It doesn’t take much, but when a single person takes just a moment to leave me a few kind words about my work, it completely makes my day. I’m not just shouting into the void, I am reaching people.

That’s a great feeling, it costs nothing except kindness, but it fills me with the kind of motivation I need to keep going.

If you’re one of those people that’s said nice things on here, Reddit, Bluesky, or over email - thank you sincerely :)

Month On Month Views

Brace yourself if you didn’t expect super low numbers!!! Buuuut, whilst the graph below shows that I have good months and bad months, my viewership trendline is going in the right direction. That’s probably the most important thing in terms of measuring the health of DMT since everything else is built upon this foundation, so it’s good to know that whilst it may only be rising steadily, it’s still rising.

Mailer of Many Things Subscribers

Mailer of Many Things subs are steadily rising - I love these guys and what their actions say about my work. That they trust me, and enjoy my content enough to make me custodian of their contact details to stay in touch.

These are the folks who’ve slunk (slunked? slinked? …whatever) over to my Subscribers page, left me their email, and then lived happily ever after knowing that they’re never going to miss a post. Be like those guys!

Some major challenges that Younger Naive Me totally did not see coming

Is Google KillING the Indie Web?

Not so long ago, if you’d have Googled “Domain of Many Things“ then this site wouldn’t even be on the first page. Thankfully that seems to have recently changed! However, despite being ‘high’ up the results tree for low volume topics such as “GOZR” and “Mothership RPG”, there’s no sign of this site listing anywhere with a chance of visibility for “D&D House rules” or “TTRPG House rules” - arguably one of the most frequent topics I’ve written about so far.

To give that some meaning, of the 10k visits DMT has had from Jan 25 - mid Jun 25, 9k of them have come from social media referrals, and less than 200 have come from Google and other search engines. Of those 200, a good chunk will be bots, trackers and trawlers.

Add to this the rise of AI-generated summaries on Search Engine Results Pages, which, while arguably consumer-friendly, essentially pull content from sites like mine and present it for free without users ever needing to click on my link. Combined with Google’s algorithm prioritising large, ‘trustworthy’ brands, primarily its own, like Reddit and YouTube - it’s starting to feel like Google is slowly killing the internet as we know it.

I’m still here though, still publishing, daring to dream. I shall not be browbeaten by a sodding search engine owned by a mega-corporation that’s starting to resemble Weyland-Yutani more and more each year. Blogging has had to adapt to find new ways of being seen.

A Nice Little Cathartic Rant About Social Media Trolls!

More tea, vicar?

As you can see, with Google and pals accounting for exactly 1.99% of incoming traffic, all hope of survival comes down to successfully syndicating posts on social media and building from there. (If you know something I don’t, and have a better idea - please get in touch!)

Of the two that I use, Reddit and Bluesky, Bluesky is still in it’s problematic infancy (there’s very little engagement unless you’re famous or established, or find yourself in a popular starter pack) so Reddit’s the key one, but it’s a double-edged sword. I owe it most of my traffic - and sadly also most of my migraines.

You see, Reddit’s great because it has these huge ready-made communities with thousands of likeminded people who’re united behind their interests. Happily for me, that includes subreddits for TTRPG fans.

However, be still my beating heart, because the biggest groups have also got strictly enforced rules on how frequently you are allowed to share links to your own content, usually once per week. Great for deterring spammers and people trying to sell you things, but for people trying to add value in the TTRPG blogosphere - you’ve only got one shot to make your week’s work worthwhile. That’s a lot of pressure.

Side Note - I mean, I get it - there’s a lot of low effort AI slop shovelers out there, but I have literally come across people asking a question that a) I’ve written about, and b) justifies a long form answer, but if I’ve already shared a link once this week, or plan to do so then I’m simply not allowed to point them to my blog.

I want to make this crystal clear - these communities have bootstrapped themselves up to something huge and valuable, and their custodians have every right to protect that. Their rules are in effect - I respect that.

However, I want you to keep this little situational setup in mind, as it neatly brings me to the fundamental problem I have with Reddit - the trolls and haters simply have too much power thanks to the ability to anonymously abuse the downvote system.

OK, so, you remember that weekly post you’re allowed to make, that one that you’re totally reliant upon to deliver traffic to your website for that week, and upon who’s success you depend upon to give you that little motivational dopamine kick? Yeah, that’s the one…

That post can be, and is; regularly killed off at birth by just a small handful of users downvoting your post for no better reason than they disagreed with it, or even more petty - because they’ve got a personal vendetta against posts that fail to meet their own warped definition of acceptable “self promotion”.

Bear in mind, Reddit’s own rules state that downvoting is only supposed to be done in the case of posts that don’t marry up to the community’s niche or low effort posts that add nothing. Certainly not just because you subjectively disagree with a post, or it’s right to even exist.

So let me teach you how to suck eggs. Here’s broadly how I think Reddit works: If a post is upvoted and commented on it becomes more visible, therefore more people will find it and of those, more people will comment. This creates more visibility and the cycle repeats, it’s called going viral. After exactly 48 hours, Reddit itself draws a hard box around this virality and removes the post from the organic results pages in order to make space for new posts to gain traction. It’s the circle of life, baby.

Flip that though, if the very first thing that happens to your post is that some bored hater sees it and downvotes it out of spite, well my buddy, from that point onwards your post is in a death spiral and is likely going to get buried. You can easily identify these unfortunate posts, because after a few hours they’ll have next to no views, no visible upvotes, and only one or two votes in total. It doesn’t take years of playing Cluedo to see that this murder was committed by ‘two haters’, ‘on Reddit at the opportune time’, ‘with the downvote system’.

Those who can’t create, jealously destroy. Maliciously downvoting new posts without a legitimate reason is just about the most harmful and spirit crushing thing that these guys can do to independent creators, and that’s why they love to sit around all day on social media looking for the opportunity to do it.

Think about it - We had one shot to get seen this week, and for a blog like DMT that’s potentially thousands of views that didn’t happen because of the bitter malice of a tiny number of users. Sadly, this turns Reddit syndication into a miserable little game where you have to ‘post and pray’ that the first few interactions react with enough upvotes to counter the highly motivated inevitable bad actors.

Don’t get me wrong, it is wonderful when a post survives that crucial first 30 minutes, and even more so if it then goes on to become viral. But it’s in the minority of cases. It’s such a shame, because even with just one post a week, as long as that one post wasn’t arbitrarily strangled off at birth, then passionate independent bloggers like DMT and many others would have a much easier time being able to carve out a following.

Want Indie Sites Like DMT to Flourish? Here’s How You Can Help!

Firstly - Thank you for being here and reading this post. It’s not my usual content, but I figured that folks might be interested in some real talk this week. Time will tell if I was right.

Got a blog yourself? Get in touch - we should have a Discord server or something and unite like when the Power Rangers combine all their droids into one big unstoppable machine! Seriously, I reckon there’s something in this, hit me up.

Here to read? Reach out, drop me an encouraging comment and let me know what you’d like to see next - it’s actually quite challenging to know what kind of content will go down well or not, so if you’ve got some thought’s about what you’d like to read my take on - chuck them below the line!

Follow me on Bluesky and Reddit, and engage with and share my posts - it all helps enormously!

If you really want to be a total boss, sign up to the Mailer of Many Things for monthly updates and some exclusive freebies (like my android app that simplifies managing random encounters at the game table).

Conclusion

Phew. OK, this was a bit of a cathartic exercise and I certainly don’t intend on making this a regular occurrence. I really hope that it’s been an interesting insight for you all into what’s happening behind the scenes, and to all my bloggers in arms, I hope you see this too and know that you’re not alone! Take care and stay safe out there, the internet can be an unforgiving place.

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.