watch this space!

This is an obligatory blog launch post. The old blog is dead. Here’s the new one. I’ve once more moved platforms and domains. Welcome to the new show. The old website is now retired and the Internet Archive serves its backup repository. I hop from one online publishing platform to another almost more often than I post on any of them, forever dazzled by the shiny new thing. The last one was on Ghost, this one is using micro.blog. Instead of going for some kind of ironically recursive domain, this time I’ve opted for a self-inflicted real names policy. It me.

I didn’t quit Ghost because I didn’t like it. It offers a super online publishing experience. If you want to build audience, monetise content, develop a good e-newsletter following, Ghost is your bag. It’s open source if you want to self-host, is heading down a federated content syndication path, and has really good pricing tiers depending on how pro you want to go. It’s also not evil.

But I’m not in the monetisable content racket (not that I’ll refuse cash, mind you!). I don’t have an audience. I’m not terribly interested in growing one, either. I’m presently fine with just doing my part to contribute to the overall online din. But I am really interested in syndication. The drawing appeal to micro.blog wasn’t the posting GUI (it’s winning awards in minimalism!) or design, but rather what’s under the hood. It takes federated posting very seriously, incorporating ActivityPub and playing really nicely with ATProto and Nostr protocol platforms. In this iteration of the blog, I’m far less bothered by how the content looks on its own WeBlog, and more curious about where it can go and how far it can travel across decentralised, federated services. Real nerd stuff, but as online publishing and social posting merge, it becomes more and more important to not be locked into, or at the mercy of, a single corporate platform or a small set of them that can wipe you off the internet in a single moderator’s decision.

If Meta’s Threads decides to hate me, this rant can still run through federated sharing on Mastodon, find a spot on Bluesky, or any number of Nostr clients. It’s alll movable, exportable and self-hostable should it come to that. This becomes pressing as more governments around the world are finding their tolerance limits of an unrestricted global internet. We need better protocols that aren’t dependent on the same centralised and easily firewalled gateways.

That aside, micro.blog also allows for a nice mix of pint-sized social posts and long blogs all in one interface, has a mercifully useable posting app that’s about as simple as posting a tweet, toot, or skeet, and is nicely open source and maintained by friendly developers who actually respond to bug reports. So here’s where the show will be for a while, as always developing the site, breaking it, trying things, failing at it, adding and removing stuff all on main, before a live studio audience.

Watch this space.