Following the quite predictable implosion and subsequent exodus of users from the hellscape that Twitter became once Elon gave free reign to the toxic horde, I “followed the spiders” across the internet in search of somewhere better to procrastinate.
A part of me asks “why bother”. There will always be somewhere new to discover - the internet never slows down. I’m often caught between the idea of setting up a beach-head for myself - becoming a fool on a hill - or descending into any of the “town squares” - the various popular social networks that seem to rise and fall every few years.
I’ve been writing a public journal - a “blog” - for over twenty years. Along the way I’ve seen countless platforms come and go. In the beginning of course there were no platforms - if you wanted to publish your thoughts it meant signing up for a web hosting account. Everybody was an island, and we would spend time building bridges among the archipelago.
In the same way that Wells’ martians gazed jealously towards Earth, so Meta must have looked upon Twitter, given the speed with which they resurrected a long dead social experiment, re-badged it “Threads”, and set out on a spectacularly successful user trawling expedition.
For a while Threads seemed like it might be the future for many - an advertising free micro-blogging platform - a free start initially absent of marketers, advertisers, and trolls. Notice the word “initially”. A tipping point has been reached in recent weeks - a critical mass that has drawn the gaze of the brands, marketers and trolls. Suddenly the small-town feel of Threads has begun to erode - with it’s numerous small communities seeing the arrival of chain coffee shops, restaurants, bill-boards, shopping malls, and the inevitable army of trolls, attention seekers and “influencers” that follow any community where they might command eyeballs, hearts and minds.
We’ve been here before.
Blogger, ICQ, Geocities, LiveJournal, Vox, Posterous, Yahoo 360, Jaiku, Plurk, Tumblr, Wordpress, TypePad, MySpace, MoveableType, Google+, Buzz… I could go on.
While a few of those platforms are still with us, they are a shadow of what they once were. As each platform has taken it’s place in the sun migrations have emptied each of it’s neighbours. In more recent times “the community” came together to “fix” the ever-repeating cycle of silos and ring-fenced communities - giving birth to “the fediverse” - the “federated internet” - where no one company owns or controls either a platform, or your data. The only problem with this lofty ideal? It requires effort on the part of it’s users.
People are lazy. And busy.
Why even think about building your own city, when you can arrive on the doorstep of an already thriving metropolis and immediately set about finding your tribe? It explains why Mastodon, Pixeltube, Peerfed, Friendica, and Writefreely have never gained significant traction against the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
I didn’t set out to write a monologue. I set out to wonder where might be best to “throw my hat” in the months ahead. Where might be “good enough”. Where I might find a tribe that doesn’t expect too much, but might also appreciate me quietly sitting in a corner and volunteering my tuppence-worth every now and again. Not sharing selfies every day like the attention-whore glitterati that have descended on Threads - more emptying my head into the keyboard about subjects that nobody else was thinking about, or really set out to read about.
You know the funny thing? I may have found my ultimate destination some time ago, but didn’t realise it.
Substack.
Yes, they’re paying to attract influential writers, and yes, they could do with a small army of user interface and interaction designers, but my word has their trajectory been spectacular. Where else can you find the likes of Patti Smith, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Stephen Fry, Chuck Palahniuk, Nick Hornby, Richard Dawkins and Pamela Anderson (yes, that Pamela Anderson) writing personal blogs, alongside a rapidly growing community of old-media journalists, retired columnists, and plain-old-garden-bloggers such as myself?
Of course this is me though, and rather than switch platforms yet again, I’m trying to be everywhere, for everybody, all at once (isn’t that a movie title?). I’m cross-posting to Wordpress, Tumblr, Medium, and Substack.
Now and again the urge to find out what other’s think of each platform overtakes me, and a quick search uncovers an entire universe of commercial bloggers espousing Wordpress rule over the internet universe, and how you can buy their get-rich-quick series of posts, videos, and podcasts about how you too can live happily ever after while holed up in a perfect cabin with a laptop somewhere.
It strikes me that the same writers that destroyed Wordpress - turning it into a publishing rather than a blogging platform - arrive at any sufficiently popular platform and mansplain to the masses what to write, how to write, when to write it, and so on - you know, instead of telling anybody how their day went - unless of course that doesn’t preclude carefully posed, heavily photoshopped gym-flex photos of themselves inbetween yoga and boutique coffee shop visits.
I’m not ranting. In the words of the Dowager Countess of Grantham, “I’m explaining”. And certainly not mansplaining - more muttering to myself while the rest of the world gets on with it’s day, oblivious to the unfolding idiocy that doesn’t seem to matter to anybody else.
This post doesn’t really have a point. It’s just me - emptying my head - and wondering how many plates I can continue to spin until they all come crashing down.
Perhaps I do have a point though.
The famous writers that have begun to gather at Substack seem to be mostly independent - devoid of any sort of agenda or mission to prove the validity of what they might share. They are without publishers, agents, or marketers filtering, shaping, or writing their words for them. It’s refreshing, and brings about an authenticity that a lot of the “social internet” has been missing for a long time.