A Place of My Own

I’ve had this website for about 25 years now, and it has changed many times along the way. I never considered it my main outlet, especially not while Twitter was around. Twitter was simply more convenient, the community was great, and interacting there was far more engaging. Still, I always kept this site around, because I knew it was my place. Whatever the other platforms did, I could always fall back on it.

Myke Hurley, who started his own blog The Enthusiast a while ago, put it nicely¹:

For many years, that place was Twitter. It was where I told people to go to find out what I was up to, to see what I was interested in, and to read what I wanted to publish for the world to see. But now, where do I tell you to go? Instagram? Bluesky? Mastodon? Threads? None of these places feel like a space of my own, in a way I probably should never have assumed Twitter was.

That captures how I feel quite well. In fact, even though Twitter was still thriving back then, I think this was my main motivation for introducing Daring Fireball–style link posts here in 2012. They let me comment on things I read online that I would otherwise have just thrown into Tweetbot.

Mastodon, with its federated approach, is technically interesting, but it never stuck with me the way Twitter did. So I think this realization kicked in a bit earlier for me, even if I never put it into words. Marco Arment describes the cost of losing that kind of community in his recent post “Community”:

Without participating in a large, broad tech community, I’m exposed to fewer new ideas, both of my main jobs (app development and podcasting) are much harder, the quality and reach of my work have suffered, my skills aren’t improving as much, my mind is less stimulated, and I feel disconnected from my professions and passions. My world has gotten smaller.

Maybe that’s why chrrp.eu struck such a nerve earlier this year.

I’m a fan of the old web and the technologies that emerged back then. RSS is one of them². It’s basically the only way I can consume the web and stay sane doing so.

I don’t reach the audience I once did on Twitter, but that probably doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s even worth more if the two or three people who really want to read this make the effort and find their way here.

Getting my thoughts onto this site isn’t as convenient, as the number of posts and the bursts they come in make obvious. I keep trying to make it easier, and for now I think I’ve found a decent setup. More on that later.

Maybe the future of the web is its past.