Putting my posting money where my mouth is

I had to leave Twitter when Twitter became X (motto: we put the X in Toxic!). I first hopped over to Mastodon but found it too technically challenging even for me. Then Bluesky opened to public use and I set up an account there, happy that posts weren’t being throttled/algorithmized, etc.

Lately, though, even BlueSky isn’t scratching my itch. I am just done with 300-byte conversations. This world absolutely needs context. It needs depth! You can’t explain anything reliably in 300 characters; you can talk past people but you can’t make a point with any reliability. Trite sound bites are what has gotten us the distracted world we now find ourselves in.

So last week, I posted to BlueSky how I was going to dust off my RSS Feed Reader and start consuming news again without any billionaire nor algorithm telling me what to read.

This Bluesky post (I can’t call them skeets, sorry) generated all of zero likes and zero comments. Well, that was disappointing! Is it that no one remembers RSS? No one cares? Do my Bluesky posts get lost because of the supposed Bluesky feature of not having an algorithm to boost them?

Truth is, I don’t know. All I can do what I’ve been doing since 1998: sharing my opinion on stuff.

Then I looked at my trusty blog here at markturner.net. It has been looking kinda stale, too. I’ve been using WordPress’s “Post This!” Javascript feature to post snippets of news stories that have caught my eye. That’s better than nothing as most of them do include my take on the stories, however I saw right away I can do better. I can’t urge others to start consuming info via RSS if I myself am keeping my content inside the very walled gardens that are chafing me.

That’s why this week I’ve begun to post again to my blog. I am going to make a point to rely less on the non-free, non-open channels and proudly plant my flag on my own little corner of the Internet like I did over twenty-seven years ago. Before Facebook. Before Twitter. Even before Google. Yes I might add a plugin to distribute these posts out to other platforms but this will become primary again.

Thanks for reading my blog and I hope you will find something useful here every now and then!