Back at the turn of the millenium, blogging was the way we shouted into the void. Democratized web publishing seemed radical. The act of editing in raw HTML and FTP’ing it up to some server, or running Radio Userland or some other bespoke script/code mashup to push unvarnished thought to a shared hosting account for all the world to see was a signal that you were part of the cyberspace revolution everybody promised in early Wired features. While it wasn’t the first “social media” — boards and chatrooms were — blogging was the beginning of something.

It has been 27 years since I first “blogged.” My first domain is long deceased, and much of the ephemera of my early blogs has been purged to /dev/null. Of course, the same is true of many of the publications that I worked for during that time and the things I wrote for them–good luck finding anything I wrote at Information Week, Government Computer News, Baseline Magazine, eWeek, TechTarget, Defense Systems, or anything before my first byline at Ars Technica. But blogging itself has blended into the rest of the online medium, and its early culture of “blog ring” intentional community has all but evaporated.

That’s partly because it was subsumed by mass social media and “microblogging”–Facebook and Twitter had a critical mass of people on them, and the conversation that had started in blog comment threads and loose federation moved into the for-profit platforms. Even your grandma was on Facebook. And all the Twitterati were posting what they had for lunch.

But while the dream of cyberspace was connecting with people globally and learning from each other, mass social media has become a toxic waste dump – full of disinformation, AI-generated attention grabbing and weaponized ignorance. Refugees from Elon’s X are looking to other platforms to regain some of the magic that Twitter appeared to have in the early days, but Mastodon is a fleet of volunteer pirate communities with a totally different vibe and BlueSky is still not at critical mass.

At least for now, mass social media seems to be dying – and in X’s case, it is dead to me.

So I’m doing what I’ve been thinking about doing since Elon carried the sink into Twitter – I’m taking back my platform. I have let this domain basically sit here for nearly 4 years, and have used it and other domains I’ve owned in the past to post long-format posts that I linked to from the other “social” platforms. Now, I’m going to use it as my primary posting place and self-syndicate it with links in an attempt to both keep control of my content and keep it out of the AI scraping hands of X and Meta.

Let’s see how it goes.