Micronoughts
In the early days much if not most blogging was microblogging, and then Twitter effectively took over that niche. I’ve been off that site for some time, and I’ve played several different times with Mastodon, and lately I’ve been spending time playing with Bluesky.
Maybe it’s the onset of the dark and the cold as we headlong toward winter, but lately I’ve been feeling dissatisfied and restless online, but with no clear sense of specific causes. I’m poking at Mastodon a bit again, but there’s a very non-zero chance that I just like looking at the official iOS app, whose design I find weirdly calming compared to the standard of other platforms.
Part of me likes the idea of a presumptive ephemerality, although really only Mastodon lets you auto-delete your posts on a schedule so in most cases it’s not really ephemeral so much as attentively transient. At the same time, whenever I’ve had reason to get rummaging in my old Twitter archive it’s led to some useful rediscoveries about things such as my pre-diagnoses mental and physical health. So, maybe I don’t want my microblogging to be entirely ephemeral after all?
One option is to return to paying $5/month for Micro.blog just for, well, microblogging. It could be directly followed and interacted with from ActivityPub (the protocol behind Mastodon and other “fediverse” services), and with any luck eventually the same can be said for AT Protocol (the one behind Bluesky), obviating the need for separate accounts on those services at all.
It would sort of split the difference: I could microblog in a way that reaches both federated networks, but also maintains an ongoing history and record in a location and format that’s more readily searched and examined should I need.
The only other alternative would be to microblog directly here, although I’d want to find a robust technical means of firmly dividing them out so they aren’t cluttering my regular posts, let alone pummeling the RSS feed—but, honestly, I don’t really want to put that kind of work into it.
I’m stumped.
And it’s nagging at my mood.
Addenda
- Since I don’t know what’s causing the underlying unease, I’m figuring that it would be nice to have this settled in time for a decision that starts clean at the new year.