Hello, I'm Billy Wilcosky. I live near Atlanta, GA, US. This is my first post for consumption via the Gemini Protocol. Another beginning...
I'll use this first post to talk about what led me to this point.
I grew up in a middle class family. Mom, Dad, Grandma, and three older sisters lived with me. I'm the youngest and only son. Since my sisters were older than me and into different things I was alone a lot. Plus we moved a lot. It was hard to make and keep friends. That, in part, might have contributed to why I enjoy the Internet so much. You can communicate with people throughout the world instantly. Plus, you can create things and share them with people throughout the world.
I've always be into creating. I started with drawing. I'd draw comic books in elementary school and early on I found that I was pretty good at looking at a picture of an animal, and drawing it. Yes, animals specifically. Or plants. Or objects. Basically, I'm horrible at drawing humans.
My favorite way to draw these days is to stipple. Making little dots at different concentrations to create the subject.
In high school I moved on to another form of art. Music. I taught myself how to play the guitar and already knew I could sing decently. After graduating high school I started to play at coffee shops and various open mic nights. I would mostly play covers and then mix in an original song here or there.
This is a re-recording because the original was recorded 15 years prior to this recording, but this is one of the first songs I wrote:
https://biao.bandcamp.com/track/youve-got-me
In 2005 I started a band called Chasing Katie with some guys I ran into around my college campus. We didn't cover other artists much. We wrote all original music. We released an album in 2005/2006. A few songs were recorded at a studio in one night, but most were recorded on a BOSS BR-8 zip disk recorder in a church basement.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_li00ZJMWjkc8Stcm_Mbs3CD52H7Z4mpPo
Around the same time I launched my first website at indieshows.net (no longer there) and it was a place for independent bands to post their upcoming shows. At the time there wasn't a place like it.
Soon after, other indie concert posting sites appeared which were better looking and had more features than mine. I tired to keep mine going but life got busy and I didn't have money to advertise it. Within a few years I delete it.
I then went on to create various forums, community websites, personal websites, and so on.
I witnessed the web go from people like me launching sites to things like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter launching.
When Twitter first launched I didn't get it. I thought... you can already post on MySpace and you can customize your MySpace profile. Why would you want to post on Twitter? Then I realized you could post from your phone and sort of got the hype. Posting from your phone to the Internet, quickly, just before smartphones, without an app (because you did it through text messaging then) was pretty radical. It was a little sad when Twitter discontinued the ability to post via text message. End of a huge and innovative era.
Admittedly, I was always a little jealous of Twitter and Facebook. Why, when at their core they were/are just places to post messages, did they grow so huge? Why did they see success and none of my projects did?
Then, they started doing weird things... the Twitters and Facebooks of the web...
They went public, started selling user data, and became huge advertising/marketing platforms. AKA social media. Since they went public they have one goal: Make investors happy.
The rest is history. Enshittification took over the web.
I took a break from building things on the web for about a year. I purged all of my creations. I even took down my personal website for a moment. The exact year and even what all I purged is fuzzy... I went through a very rocky moment in life. Then I quit my job after the company started going in a direction that was difficult to support. This was after giving them 16 years of my life. It was a pretty traumatic time and so I think my brain naturally wants me to forget.
So, there's definitely a blur from about 2020 through 2024. Who knows what I was doing.
I think it was in about 2024/2025 I returned? Could have been 2023. I focused on rebuilding my personal website and sharing new music under the artist name Breathing in and out. Mostly electronic music. I also started a website were I shared nothing but links to positive things.
I started a résumé posting/sharing website in 2025 while looking for work. I did this to get back into the web building game more deeply, but also because my career up to that point was related to recruiting. I knew there was already LinkedIn, Indeed, etc. I still wanted to try creating something related to my work experience. I also thought that maybe it could somehow help me find a new job in some way. An employer would see I started a talent acquisition related website, be impressed, and hire me.
The site:
I also created WordPress plugins (some from before my big purge that I found backups of and revived) and a couple of WordPress themes.
In between things I had been working on an anti-social media network. Or in other words, a place without as many vanity metrics and without endless short form video scrolling. I went back and forth on format. I also held off finishing it for a bit. People wouldn't join. What would the point be?
I found a new job, finally. Building webpages. Finally. I always wanted a job related to the web. I didn't get the job by applying. I had already put in about 300 - 500 applications at places. Instead, I just reached out to this company directly because I had once worked with the owner on a project at my old job. He remembered me and gave me a shot.
Everything started going well again. I felt good.
I finished up the anti-social media project and launched a version of it in July of 2026. A few people found it and I'm glad something I've created is being utilized.
That brings me to now. I decided to join smol.pub and publish things for the Gemini Protocol because of people talking about it at Ctrl+Shift+3.
I think what I'll do with this space is, any time I publish a blog post at wilcosky.com (going forward), I'll copy and paste the same post here. So, people can read my blog at my website, or via this Gemini capsule.
It's also fitting that I'm starting this now. It feels like a new chapter in my life is going on... with my new job, new web projects, and new spaces like this.
Here's to an acceptable, calm, and happy at times future!