Don’t we have too many of these? No, wait, we have too few.

Twitter has been less and less useful to me in 2023. I joined in August 2013, and had loved the site up until Elon Musk fully acquired it in October 2022. Twitter in the 2010s was a messy place. It was full of harassment, hostility, anger, politics, and loads of nasty tweets.

But despite this, Twitter had been an incredibly valuable tool to millions of people. For me, I could keep a close watch on all the happenings around the world. I used it for keeping up to date with politics, global news, events, and disasters, not to mention with online friends, acquaintances, YouTubers, and streamers.

The global network of people tweeting made it an unimaginably valuable place for someone like me.

Blogging was largely supplanted with Twitter and the like. You could write blog posts with threads, however fractured and annoying that became. But now we’re living in a paradigm shift. I’m deeply unhappy with Musk’s purchase of Twitter and his bad changes. I think other people are, too.

Now, people are taking up microblogging services like Bluesky and Mastodon (lol @ Threads) and paid newsletter sites like Substack. But we can also go back to plain blogs.

For years I’ve had the opinion that people should write blog posts instead of tweet threads. Just link to the blog post in a tweet. I thought of blogging on your own website provided a way to prevent slicing down thoughts into 140 or 280 characters. It also meant that the Internet Archive could better save your thoughts, unreliant on the feebleness of social media sites.

I recall I had blogged before, but I think I’ve lost that stuff and it wasn’t saved on the Internet Archive. I also have three drafts in my Medium account, all unpublished.

Now is a good opportunity to blog again. I want a place to write and publish longer and more cohesive written thoughts, and have people be able to read it for the rest of time.

Here’s to making my mark on the web.