I Am Trying To Write More

Until about six months ago I had drawn a hard line on social media. I am not proud of this since I prefer to take a thoughtful approach to things. Thoughfulness and absolutes make poor neighbors, and so with the new year it seems like a good time to reflect, in writing, on how I am using and plan to use this site in the next season of life.

Past

To review where I am coming from, apart from the occasional foray into the Fediverse I have not had an active social media presence since maybe 2017. LinkedIn is arguably an exception since I have largely maintained an account there, but even this one was mostly dormant.

That began to change this past summer when I opened public accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky. This followed me shutting down my self-hosting presence, and looking back it seems fair to say the implicit logic was that, if I was no longer self-hosting my code repositories and personal data, then why not jump back into the mix and reconnect with old friends. If it also gave me the chance to reconsider my aversion, so much the better.

I did indeed reconnect with some old friends, which has been great. But as so often happens, I ended up learning as much about myself as anything else. For starters, it seems clear now that I cannot have something like social media available to me at all times without becoming like a rat hitting a feeder bar. Second, most of the conversation on microblogging sites in particular is designed to be ephemeral—which is great!—but it doesn’t really work for me. I can’t help feeling like the sort of off-the-cuff post I might make on Bluesky is a poor match for the permanence of the Internet. I’ve seen too many people get a lot of negative attention for saying something thoughtless online, and I know that there but for the grace of God go I.

Present

But anyway, that brings us up to today. I have accounts on a handful of social media sites. Some accounts I’ve already deleted again, but most of them have survived this experiment the past six months. That said, it feels like time to re-orient my time online toward writing more, and more often.

There are some IndieWeb principles that I intend to put into practice to help make this happen. The most relevant of these is POSSE or “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.” In other words, everything that seems worth posting on social media will first be posted to this site, and then (usually?) linked from my other accounts.

The way I see this helping is by introducing some friction. While it is entirely possible to automate the syndication process, I still maintain a static website. I considered adding a dynamic backend to automate the syndication, and even had the beginnings of an architecture drawn up, but my heart wasn’t in it. Then I realized this situation could work in my favor by forcing me to slow down before I post. So for now I’m considering the manual effort involved in posting a feature rather than a bug.

And the manual effort is not trivial either. Posting is effectively a three-step process:

1. Create and publish the post on this website
2. Syndicate to my social media accounts
3. Add social media links to the original post and re-publish

If I get to a point where I haved tamed the pull social media has on me then I might revisit adding a backend to support automated syndication. A middle ground option to automate would be to use a paid service like Micro.blog.

Future

As I’ve said already, the point of this is to write more. It seems necessary, in order to do that, for me to dial down my dependence on social media. I have made a few other changes to my life in the past several months as well. My primary aim has been to be more present with my family, but I hope it will make me more so with myself as well. If that happens I would like to use that headspace to read, think and write more. That writing will primarily occur here, and in an ideal world will have more substance than the half-formed thoughts I’ve contented myself with occasionally publishing here to date.

None of these are promises. I won’t even call them resolutions. Consider these things I am hoping for in the new year.