I'm Going to Need to Blog a Lot More

In January 2017, after having witnessed how much terrible disinformation spread on Facebook and certainly affected the presidential election, I made one final post calling for people to donate to some worthwhile charities and signed off. I haven't posted or commented on Facebook since.

I tried to do something similar with Twitter when Musk bought it. He seemed clearly intent on using the Twitter for his personal alt-right, trans- and xenophobic, conspiracy theory speading mission.

That much was right. But after trying to use Mastodon for the type of tech, urbanist, and cultural interactions I got from Twttier, to very limited success, I decided that there was simply too much in my industry circles still happening on Twitter to fully abandon it. So I limped back on to the site to at least be able to talk about web development and such. Slowly I slipped back into just as much activity as I had pre-Musk.

But that might not be so tenable for me anymore. Musk changing how blocking works, de-ranking posts with external links, and obviously promoting pro-Trump and right-wing posts makes it morally questionable to me to continue to use the site. I do not want to be making the richest man on the planet, someone as repulsive and wrong as Musk, more money be providing content and eyeballs for his personal disinformation system.

The problem is that I still find the Twitter alternatives to be severely lacking. The biggest problem is that they simply don't have comparable levels of community or activity. I hear Mastodon is doing ok, but I find discoverability of people and conversations there to be really, really bad. Threads? Bluesky? I'm not sure what has the critical mass I'm looking for. Everything seems so fragmented.

So with wanting to drastically cut back on my Twitter usage and not seeing a viable new homebase to migrate to, where that leave me? The most obvious answer to me is to cut back on social media in general and to own more of my own content. Then I can promote my content on several sites, and not be very attached to them.

Luckily, I already have a space for that here!

It won't be as easy as Tweeting, but maybe that's good. Maybe we could all use a little more time and space to put our thoughts together before publishing them to the whole world.

These things do get easier with practice. I'll need to get in the habit of quickly writing and publishing a post when I feel the need, instead of working on something for weeks and never finishing as I often do. This post here, in fact, is a bit of that practice.

Compared the the last 9 years though, I'm going to need to blog a lot more. I think you should too. It'll be good for us all.