It feels as though there really is some momentum for a shift away from corporate social media silos to something more humane.

I mean, just consider the constructions: "Social media" vs. "Personal blogging." Which one feels more intimate?

It's not all sunshine and rainbows in personal blogging though. Comments were always a fraught endeavor. And while some blogs grew popular organically, there were many that focused on growth and "popularity" and you could tell just by reading them.

Which, at least in my case, meant I didn't read them for long.

And there were the people who wanted to profit off that natural inclination to look for rank and establish hierarchies. I never liked Technorati for that reason, but many people loved it.

Anyway, anything is better than Twitter. I don't think people should embrace another VC-funded corporate social media silo like Post, but I get it. This stuff isn't super-hard, but it's not brain-dead simple for busy people to figure out. The corporate silos exploit that and herd users into them.

But I have very fond memories of the early days of blogging, with Al, and Hal, and James, and Garret, and Shelley, and AKMA, and Susan, and Dori, and Rob, and Elaine, and Stavros the Wonder Chicken, and Jonathon. Very fond memories. I still have a knife and an everyday pan that Al Hawkins recommended I get as a new bachelor learning to cook for himself. We kept the everyday pan even though it's aluminum and doesn't work on an induction range because it's so damn useful in the oven.

I'm sure I left a few people out in that previous paragraph. Most are still online. We didn't always agree on everything, but we mostly got along fine. I look forward to something like that again.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:45 Sunday, 1 January 2023