You could, of course, keep to the driest topics, the most tamed opinions, nothing spicier than an animal cracker, but for some this self-censorship of "your most honest, primitive, real thoughts" (to quote Naked Lunch) is tantamount to a sin, just one step up from lying to your diary.
If you are trying to keep it safe, are you truly communicating what is on your mind, or are you pasteurizing your output, homogenizing it, adding a touch of gamma radiation and a run through the freeze-drier, until the final result is palatable pablum, certainly inoffensive and low-residue, but ultimately unworth either consumption or production?
Blogging seems to have shifted on the risk/reward scale and people have responded as such. A pity.
I think this has contributed to my life-long mental health problems, as I've purposely separated myself into 2 personas. To paraphrase Agent Smith...
Jelly 1 has a job and a mortgage and a Facebook, is made of matter and occupies space, and is openly lesbian, and isn't shy to talk a little about politics or her old schizophrenia diagnosis.
Jelly 2 exists only on the dark web, never grew out of enjoying hentai, delights in posting political hot takes like "gasoline should cost more, actually", lies about absolutely everything to shake off doxxers, and doesn't even use the same username on any 2 forums.
Both Jellies are miserable most of the time, since they take turns hiding the other one from one social circle or another. Jelly 2 can never hold a job. Jelly 1 isn't convinced that there's enough stuff in the real world to kill off Jelly 2 and live alone.
"One of these lives has a future..."
It's still good to lie about everything to keep stalkers off your trail. Furthermore, it contributes to the erosion of trust that everything online is literally true. People have gotten complacent in that regard.
The reasons for blogging are varied. Part of me would like to post the odd bit of how-to on an obscure technical topic, that kind of thing. And then there's writing reviews. No expectation is had of reward, but that does not preclude the kind of risk I run if some gibbering nutjob decides I am a fascist or someone else dehumanizable because the Devil's Advocate in me might want to point out that this person was not given a fair shake in this instance, or that something else is a bigger deal than we are making it, and so on.
Of course, I would like to know that there is someone who is catching my signal besides Grim Entropy and the Inverse Square Falloffs, but then you're back to moderating comments which are largely linkback blogspam.
Um, I guess. It seems to me like most of the "controversial" stuff that people get attacked for is just lame vomit about current-events political junk. No one needs yet another clueless nobody ejecting that crap on the Internet. Go write about something interesting, like old computers, or music, or I don't know, your favorite species of grass. You'll be contributing something of value, instead of more mindless current-events garbage, and you won't get attacked for it. Win-win.
I used to be on a once-popular forum which has slowly skewed to the left, and then farther, and farther. Now everything there is politicized because the Red Guard types remaining are on the continual hunt for anything at which they might take offense. These are people who go wild for the opportunity to talk about the racist origins of steampunk.
Anyway, many years ago I added a message board to most of them so passersby could share their recollections and nostalgia. At first it was a PITA to keep out the spam. But message boards are so passe that not only is it rare to get a new comment, but it is rare to get spam too.
Unfortunately I suspect someone will break this whole category of captcha soon enough by throwing an LLM at it.
That 1% is getting massively underpaid.
Dogmatically chasing the phantom of life... disconnected from substance of life.
How easy it is to find an abuse or deprivation worth filling in with the chase for life's sensory phantom.
These people now mostly publish stuff under their own profile on Facebook, because that's where the audience is. Soon to be was.