Short-form blogging

Twitter's tragic death-spasm over the past month, and a lot of the web development community's migration away from it, has prompted renewed interest in owning the platforms where your content—especially short-form, microblogging-type content—is published. Mastodon, to which a lot of the community has migrated, is great—you can run your own instance remarkably cheaply, if that's what you're into; there are plenty of welcoming spaces no matter what your background; and most importantly, it requires minimal context-switching for the Twitter-addicted.

But while most developers already own their own publishing platform—their websites—I think that most would-be bloggers assume certain standards of polish which prevent them from posting with the frequency that they tweet. Blog posts are special: you put effort into them, and you research them, and you accumulate pictures and mixed media and draft diagrams and edit copy, and then you have friends and family read and offer criticism before going back to edit them again, and only when they glitter and hum with immaculate energy do you click the Post button.

But that doesn't have to be the case. Your website is your own: you can put whatever you want up on there. You don't have to impress an editor or a publisher. And I think that a few folks online are coming around to that manner of thinking: Dave Rupert wrote recently about trying to publish more "shorter posts of ideas that stick in my head." Tania Rascia recently gave herself "permission to put whatever I want on the site." Andy Bell's blog has also pivoted towards more short-form content in the past few weeks, and Tyler Angert started a Stream back in May.

This isn't a recent trend. One of my goals from last year was to write more short-form stuff, mostly as a tool for helping me remember what I've thought (the mythical Second Brain!). As of today I've written 90 short posts for my Stream (including this one)—which I'm quite pleased with! My Stream was originally inspired by Simon Collison's Stream, which has been publishing since November 2019, but folks like John Gruber and Jason Kottke (who's back from sabbatical) have been posting stream-like content for years now.

A small part of this is probably due to the resurgence of RSS (itself probably a reaction to increasingly algorithmic feeds) over the past year or two as a medium for consuming the written word online—and the spoken one: podcast feeds are RSS feeds too!

Others have explained how I feel about Twitter much better than I could, so I've been mostly silent on the subject. But I think that Simon's perspective aligns well with mine: "unless you have a business, product or skill to promote, stop giving idiot billionaires your thoughts and energy." I wrote something similar a couple weeks ago, and I think that's why we see folks like Wes Bos and Adam Wathan—that is, people with something to sell—still tweeting merrily away.

But I'm not crazy about hanging out there anymore—not that I contributed particularly to the discourse in the first place. But Twitter's value is in its mindshare, and in its network effects, and in its community—and a lot of that community is moving off of the platform.

That being said, there's to be a certain web development subdemographic for whom Twitter continues to be where the community lives, and I think that that subdemographic probably hasn't been impacted particularly by Twitter's change in leadership. People like Wes and Adam have to stay on Twitter, and have to stay bullish on Twitter, because that's where a lot of their audience is; but others, like Taylor Otwell, give me the vibe that they don't mind Musk's leadership.

Personally, I'm also not a huge fan of Mr. Musk, but per the above advice I don't spend a ton of time thinking about him, and I don't rate his ability to micromanage a social network.

Farewell, Twitter, Simon Collison

So I'm on Mastodon now.

It's nice!—it feels quiet in a good way. A lot of my toxic feelings about Twitter revolve around the sense that something is always happening and that if I'm not constantly watching, I'll miss some fantastic joke or some cultural meta or the rise and fall of some meme. I don't even really get anything out of it beyond a sick sense of satisfaction when an ePiC bUrN is delivered, or a gut-wrenching inadequacy at not being the one who came up with it. Mastodon, by virtue of being a smaller community (for the minute), doesn't really evoke those feelings.

On the flip side, because Mastodon isn't driven by hype, likes, and retweets (again, for the minute), it feels like a much better fit for folks that are looking for some community online; for that reason, Mastodon seems to get lumped in with Discord as representative of the "new generation" of social media platforms^[1]. (Fittingly, their apps even look similar.) In that sense, I'm not sure that Mastodon'd be a good fit for the Wes Boses and Adam Wathans of the world: people who produce valuable content in the name of selling a product. Even the best devrel folks—people like Adam Argyle or Jhey Tompkins or even Lee Robinson, who do a great job at creating a community around the products they're hawking—would feel the smallest bit out of place^[2].

Joining Mastodon has also led to a corresponding decrease in my Twitter use. I've deleted the app from my phone, and only use the web app now. There's just enough jank in the web app, and just enough friction in accessing it, to prevent me from reaching for it whenever I have 10 seconds of downtime (running tests, e.g.). I don't miss it.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that I'm quite a member of the web development community at this point—and certainly not on Mastodon specifically. I try to put Content out but I'm awful at self-marketing, so I think a lot of it just sort of goes out into the void. Maybe that's okay: maybe I'm just writing for me. I've always wanted to be famous but I don't know what I'd do with it. So I'm not sure to what extent Mastodon's really going to do it for me. But I'm gonna give it the old college try.

1. Fittingly, their apps even look similar.
2. As of writing, only Jhey Tompkins is on Mastodon.

Identifying powerfully with Robin Rendle’s “My home on the web”. Twitter has long felt like my default hangout: somewhere to catch up on the meta, to feel lost in a crowd, to keep up. Before Twitter I was on Instagram, and Facebook before that, back when I lived in Japan. Each of these places gradually ratcheted up my anxiety until being there, on the platform, lurking, became unbearable.

Lately I’ve been trying to replace Twitter with a combination of RSS and podcasts, but my lizard brain won’t let it go. Where will I read the jokes? The hot takes? How will I trigger the subtle fleeting pleasure of recognising the subject of a subtweet?

My attachment to Twitter is purely emotional; there are practical replacements. Podcasts are good for keeping up with the latest developments on the web platform, and my voice is but a quiet one in the vast modern chorus of RSS evangelism. Just today, Stu Robson updated his .opml list file of RSS feeds, and Šime Vidas also maintains a great list of dev feeds that could very plausibly replace Twitter (full disclosure: I’m on Šime’s list!). Either one of these (or any of many others!) can be imported into your RSS reader of choice for a significantly higher signal-to-noise ratio than you’ll find on the bird app dot com.

For solace I turn to my abandonment of Facebook circa 2017—a choice which brought me, and continues to bring me, great joy and great relief. In latter years it effectively became a birthday calendar for me, and an easy lookup for big events in the lives of people I only ever really had a passing acquaintance with in the first place. I’ve successfully replaced Facebook with a carefully-curated contacts list, courtesy of Flexibits’s Cardhop—though the lengths to which I’ll go to note down my contacts’ life events (for posterity) could feasibly be interpreted as Psycho Behaviour.

As for actually producing content, there’s an abstract sort of satisfaction to owning your own platform, your own space on the web. Sure, distribution’s a bit of a problem—but I’m writing mostly for myself here, and I can syndicate links to Twitter if I feel like it, and it’s possible that I’ve got one or two subscribers via RSS. And while a feed with a single user on it can feel a bit lonely, the whole rest of the web is just a hyperlink away.

My home on the web, Robin Rendle

Discussions of censorship are reaching a bit of a local maximum on Twitter as a result of a certain billionaire's semi-abortive takeover attempt & crusade against... the algorithm's silencing of powerful voices? & before I mute the term, I want to record my reaction to appeals to censorship.

Hark: just like "innovation", the word "censorship" doesn't actually signify anything. Nothing meaningful, no position on issues, nothing actionable. Instead, it's a boogeyman that bad-faith actors on Twitter deploy to indicate that someone's preventing them from disseminating their message. That's it.

I have no position on censorship—just like I don't have a position on culture or transportation, since they, like censorship, are so broad that having an opinion on them is semantically unparseable. "I'm a big proponent of e.g. seating," said no one ever.

Don't get me wrong—insofar as censorship just means "you can't do that", there are:

• good acts of censorship: laws banning hate speech or shouting "fire" in a theatre, rules preventing workplace abuse—all of which I support, and
• bad acts of censorship: laws banning books from school curricula, preventing freedom of gender expression, stymying government-critical media—which I don't support.

These are all personal value judgments, and it's possible for you to disagree with me, and that's fine. But, crucially, you can extrapolate these opinions into relationships, or into policy, or into codes of conduct, or into approaches to economics and society. My point is: these positions mean something, and you can hold me to account on them. I'm not just saying, "Censorship is great," or "Censorship is awful"; I'm commenting on the underlying acts instead.

So next time you see someone decrying censorship & modern snowflake culture, ask yourself instead what the poster is actually opposed to, and what their vagueness is meant to make you feel.