Oh yeah if anybody saw how I had been posting on mastodon instead of on this blog for a few years, I have now bailed on that and I’m back to just posting on this blog. The fediverse is a cool idea and I learned a ton from the experience of trying to use that as my main online presence, but my reasons are as follows:
- The fediverse is still social media which means it mostly comes with the same problems. It solves a few problems by being open source and federated but it also introduces about as many new problems as it solves. In the end I’ve ultimately learned I’m just not into social media anymore. The closest thing to it I want for my personal life is this blog (which almost nobody will ever see) and group chats with my close friends and family
- I don’t want to host your content/speech/spam on my server. I grew increasingly wary of the practical and legal ramifications of hosting a bunch of stuff I didn’t write myself on my own server in a volume that I couldn’t practically moderate. As an extension of that I also shut off all commenting on this blog. While they were open I had like 14,000 spam comments and two real ones (one being from my mom). My server is now for stuff I write/post/create/control myself and that’s it. If you want to respond that can be done via my publicly listed email which I truly invite anyone and everyone to do
- The resources required were starting to hit the limits of my VPS and I didn’t want to deal with scaling
- To the fediverse’s credit, because of its openness I was able to off-ramp without disrupting the (albeit limited) value it provided for me. I exported my data and using some quick scripting was able to import my backlog of posts from two different mastodon accounts to this wordpress blog. Imported posts are tagged accordingly. I was then able to do some more quick scripting to generate an OPML file of the accounts I follow so I could instead follow them via RSS/atom on thunderbird and feedly
- My doubts about running an instance ad-infinitum because of the points above made me want to shut down my instance sooner rather than later. I closed sign-ups quite a long time ago but I figured the longer I kept the instance up the more the few on the server as well as the broader fediverse would depend on it/expect it to be up (even if just in the form of linking to it etc). Might as well rip the band-aid off and shut it down
There are more reasons but if I’ve lost interest in writing more at this point I’m sure you’ve lost interest in reading more. So that’s it – I’m back to just this blog. And guess what? I’m re-impressed with wordpress and rss. What a mindbogglingly amazing project and ecosystem that got so so so so much right so long ago.
Sadly I can’t find hardly anyone I’m interested in following, but I’m finally at the point where I realize there’s a good reason for that. Most of the kinds of people I want in my life mostly don’t post stuff online period. Seriously, even when I check the feeds of my old big-tech social media accounts I notice that my real friends just haven’t posted stuff in years. Maybe one or two posts a year for big life updates. Posting stuff online one-to-many for anybody to go and see/read really isn’t for most normal people. So funny that it took like 15 years for that to click with me when people with more solid sense gut checked right away and were like… nah. The ones still posting mostly either want some kind of personal gain (more power to ya) or are caught up in predatory systems (hey, aren’t we all?). There are definite exceptions like artists, people connecting across cultures, people finding real community… it’s just too bad the good things have to fight for room within broken systems.
But yeah, anything further I put into those ecosystems will only be for personal gain and I’ll try to keep myself out of the predatory loops. For the few real genuine things I still want to post publicly one-to-many online as infinitely copyable and transmissible-at-the-speed-of-light bits, this blog is your one-stop-shop.