I started this blog in 2006. I used to blog quite a lot, but then Facebook, Twitter, etc took over the world and I got swept up in social media like most people.

I then got disillusioned. First with Facebook after all the drip, drip, drip of revelations about privacy breaches, election interference, fake news, user tracking, etc.

Then my Twitter feed stopped becoming useful as it got filled with political posts and just turned nasty. Ironically, as nuts as Elon Must has become (especially since buying Twitter and rebranding it to X), the feed is now actually better as many of the loud voices who spouted politics all the time left Twitter in protest against Elon Musk.

I used to regularly post photos on Instagram. But of course, Instagram is owned by Meta (Facebook) and the lack of trust made me reluctant to keep posting.

I’ve moved my blog a number of times over the years. I’ve self-hosted on servers and used Wordpress. I was on Squarespace for a while. At one time I was on an Amazon Web Services instance running Wordpress. Then finally I moved to Wordpress.com - basically because it’s cheap.

I’ve known about Micro.blog for a while and lately it seemed the perfect platform for what I need. Especially after they changed to allow posts above 300 characters. Micro.blog was originally set up as an alternative to Twitter. It’s open source, and purposefully doesn’t have things like likes or follower counts. The idea is to just post without worrying about popularity. It’s an active community that is part of the Fediverse, similar to Mastodon.

Sometimes I don’t want to post long blog posts, especially in my current situation where fatigue is a real problem. Sometimes I just want to post short thoughts, or links to something I find interesting, just like I used to do on Twitter. With Micro.blog I’ve got the option to post short posts or long blog posts and no one is going to monetise my posts or fill my feed with ads.

So here’s the plan. If it’s a long blog post I’ll cross post it to Twitter and Facebook. Short posts will just be on Micro.blog. If you want to see all my posts, long and short, you can Subscribe to my feed by email or RSS. I also cross-post to BlueSky. BlueSky looks interesting but it’s only just opened up to the general public and there’s not really that many people on there yet that I want to follow. This is the problem with social media - it’s reliant on the network effect. You are only going to use it if your friends or people you find interesting use it.