What was the final straw? I couldn’t say exactly, but now I have a blog. I’ve had a basic hosting plan for years, and they have a WordPress installer. It wasn’t as easy as I hoped but then easy wasn’t really the point. But now I have a blog, and in this my first post, I want to talk very briefly about social media.
I like being able to share my thoughts online, but what if you didn’t need to cross-post to different sites to reach different groups of people? When I post, I wish I only had to post in one place.
I like being able to read the things written by people of my choosing, but what if I didn’t need to visit a list of different sites to catch up with all the different groups of people I care about? Cycling a list of sites is an unwanted chore. I shouldn’t need to do it.
I don’t intent to reject the algorithmic feed completely. I appreciated being discoverable. I appreciated the chance encounters and being exposed to friends of friends. I wish the algorithm was something I could opt into and control. What if curation was a service people could choose along with who they follow?
Do any of the new kids on the social media block do all this? Perhaps Mastodon is getting close? Perhaps Cohost? But where’s my reader app where I can see what my mums doing on facebook as well as what the kids are doing on TikTok and what the work crew are posting on linkedin?
So now I’ve got a blog. It solves none of these problems, but at least I can tend my own garden.
Now where’s my RSS Reader?