I am a long time twitter user, but things have changed a lot on twitter since I joined in 2009. For a long time, I didn’t notice much of the changes, mainly because I’ve been using 3rd party clients since the start, and life in them has not changed much in the 11 years since I got on.
But after various levels of activity on twitter, I recently tried posting more actively, and writing more thought out tweets than where I will have lunch.
So I ended up using the official client, both the iOS one and the web app. And wow, the experience is nothing like my little heavily curated twitter feed. The Algorithm™ is now in charge of what you see, and every second tweet is a promoted one.
And, while the artificial restrictions on content length on twitter has its benefits sometimes, the fact is that it is tough to write meaningful content in 280 characters and most good content end up in tweetstorms or long threads anyways. And let’s not mention trying to have a meaningful discussion or debate in 280 characters.
So I have been thinking about moving everything to a blog. But for a long time, I have seen a blog as the complete opposite of a tweet. Where a tweet is(was) forced to be short and had no expectation of quality, I have viewed blogs as these long well thought out pieces, which preferably have gone through one or two edits by an editor. So although I have a long backlog of blog-drafts, I have not published anything since 2017, and my old blog has only three posts before this one.
There are other issues with twitter and other platforms which will I will try to cover in a later blog post. The result was that when I found out about micro.blog and the IndieWeb movement, I felt that they hit right in the heart of the issues. They had already solved, or were discussing a lot of the same things I had been thinking about.
In short
- Control (although hosting it at micro.blog means it can disappear as quickly as from any other platform, it’s a step in the right direction)
- Federated (push or pull content from the different platforms into something you control)
- Archiving (a topic for another post, but I feel the web and the content on the big platforms is more ephemeral than ever)
So here I am now, with a micro.blog account.