I haven’t been on social media for a while. Twitter was really the last place I had any sort of daily interaction and that stopped nearly four months ago. I wasn’t actually going to say anything (I didn’t think it particularly mattered honestly), but given the humorous text from a friend who noted that my tweets on Twitter were being scheduled and automated (“You rye bastard and your robotos postings”), I might as well deliver at least some reasoning for such a departure.
First, it’s not a departure. I setup a private Mastodon instance at ribeiro.social/@justin and while my plan is to not approve every follow request, there’s this magical thing that Mastodon has called an RSS feed. Yeah, that’s right, you can follow me on Feedly or your RSS reader of choice.
Here’s the thing: Twitter used to have RSS too. Then they took it away.
Which leads me into the why of things. Over the course of many years, I’ve watched the walls go up around the gardens and I’ve disliked the view. As those walls went up, I’ve been told over and over again the following statements when it comes to what I should do with my content:
“Justin, you have to start writing everything on MySpace, that’s where the engagement is. Blogs are dead.”
“Justin, you’ll never believe it, but if you’re not writing all your content on Facebook, you’re losing. Blogs are dead for real now, and so is journalism.”
“Justin, I can’t believe you’re not using the power of Medium to write all your posts. You’re losing out.”
“Justin, you’re a developer, why aren’t you writing on dev.to? That’s where all the dev’s write now. You missing out on readers.”
“Justin, you’re a businessman, why aren’t you writing on LinkedIn? That’s where all the business people write now.”
“Justin, why aren’t your photographs on Instagram? That’s where the artists are.”
Inevitably, I expect some Twitter-like statement of the above to follow since I’m not hanging out on there streaming forth content. I know it’s coming. So help me if you send me an email with such a statement I will black-hole every email you ever send me ever again. That includes you Alli, I don’t care that you’re my daughter, there is a line to be drawn. Dad has limits!
Here’s the thing about all those statements: I’ve always found them laughable while smiling and slowly backing away from the person adamantly trying to quote-unquote “save my brand”. I’ve always maintained my little blog and my little web existence for people to stumble upon freely. Social networks and writing platforms come and go. The latest and greatest becomes another also ran. Companies get greedy when the only thing they sell is their users and bad things happen. Content gets lost to the ether as walls go up and those companies change direction or crumble.
Twitter used to be fun, but the conversations are now hard to follow, the bad actors there make everything terrible, and overall the experience isn’t enjoyable for me anymore (even though their progressive web app is quite lovely and I tip my hat on that engineering effort). If it is for you (or any social network for that matter), have at it. I’m not trying to convince you to pull up stakes. It’s just not my jam at this point.
The fact is I’ve controlled my content by doing nothing more than writing here. I’ve sold my pieces to publications and museums when the opportunity has risen and my permalinks have been working for 17 years. I started to ponder this fact and couldn’t help but ask myself the question “shouldn’t my social existence on the web work the same way?”. Hence, ribeiro.social/@justin. I want permalinks for random social statuses of Bob Ross to work into the foreseeable future.
“But Justin, your brand.” Fuck my so-called brand. I’m just an ordinary person who people sometimes read and occasionally send hate mail (hi Greg!). This is me, sitting in the sun on my front porch, living out on the open web on a couple domains, a few servers, and the predilection to write and build interesting things.
You may think I’m bucking the trend. I’m just self-hosting content; this isn’t a radical idea or concept. I’m not breaking new ground, just seeding my existing 40 acres. Let’s see what I grow.