Canned Dragons

I have decided I need to introduce some changes to how I post online. I typically write a lot of link posts because I read quite a bit online and want to share things that I think are interesting. This comes from a desire to add my thoughts to what is put out there by others, and — let’s face it — comment sections are a pretty bad way to do it. Lately, though, a lot of what I see online has to do with the outrage of the week. “Outrage of the week” sounds like some cute embellishment, but it has become literally accurate. Every week, the people on the internet collectively lose their minds about a particular subject. Then, everyone gives a hot take on that subject. When the next week hits, there’s a new subject to write about. It has become an all-too-familiar standard pattern.

I’m not saying that these subjects aren’t truly outrageous (the war in Ukraine being a particularly potent example). With so many people writing about the same thing, though, adding another voice to the chorus doesn’t always feel appropriate or effective. Former religion advisor to President Obama, Micheal Wear, recently tweeted about this.

I want to continue to read about these issues, I’m just not sure that I wish to write about them. Even in the vastness of the World Wide Web, escaping “the outrage” and reading and writing about something different can be difficult. So, I’m going to slow down on link posting in the way that I have been doing it. I’ll still be blogging. I just don’t want to commit to a weekly email, in case, on any given week, I just can’t find enough that I want to write about. At least not enough to write about without getting sucked into the outrage.

Luke Harrington writes about how the outrage of the week drove him off social media. He understood that there were good people on either side of the issue.

I knew, though, that social media would not show me evidence of this. I knew the moment I opened Facebook or Twitter, I would be assaulted by a bottomless column of self-righteous gloating from one side and self-righteous screeching from the other. That I’d be forced to re-read the exact same shouting matches I’d seen rehearsed ad nauseam for decades. That panicky, breathless misinformation would spread like chlamydia, and the most ignorant, unthinking voices would be amplified to deafening levels.

A news story, told by a mob of idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

It's hard to write about what's going on in the world when social media is bringing us down to the lowest common denominator. Even long-time blogger Jason Kottke is taking a sabbatical from his general purpose blog.

Does what I do here make a difference in other people’s lives? In my life? Is this still scratching the creative itch that it used to? And if not, what needs to change? Where does kottke.org end and Jason begin? Who am I without my work? Is the validation I get from the site healthy? Is having to be active on social media healthy? Is having to read the horrible news every day healthy? What else could I be doing here? What could I be doing somewhere else? What good is a blog without a thriving community of other blogs? I’ve tried thinking about these and many other questions while continuing my work here, but I haven’t made much progress; I need time away to gain perspective.

It will be interesting to see if Jason comes back, or if he decides that having to follow what is going on around the internet is too mentally taxing and not worth the effort and the return.

Similarly, I won't be doing "Week on the Web" digests for the foreseeable future. I would rather not have to be tethered too tightly to what is going on in the web version of purgatory. I'm not some alchemist who can turn the lead of internet sentiment into the gold of something edifying. When I was using HEY World, I was writing longer posts and sending them out through email, RSS and the open web. That process didn’t require that I follow current events so closely.

HEY World

Using HEY World by 37signals worked pretty well for general purpose ad hoc blogging, but it is a very limited tool. That's mostly a feature, not a bug, but in some cases, it can be frustrating. For example, when HEY added scheduling for emails, they left it half-baked into their implementation of HEY World. You get an error, though, when you try to use it. I messaged their support folks about it, and it sounds like they have no plans to fix the bug. I find that strange, since the whole point of HEY World is that it makes blogging as easy as sending email. You would think they would want to keep the email features, like scheduling — that make sense for blogging — intact for HEY World.

There are other, more important ways, that HEY World feels like an experiment that 37signals is not pursuing further. For instance, when you export your data out of HEY, you only get your standard emails, and not the ones that have been sent to the web. This means that any blog posts you write in HEY are stuck there and disappear when you leave the service. If you spend time on your writing, and attach some value to it, that should be a deal-breaker. It certainly is for me. So, I won't be using HEY World for blogging anymore, unless I can find a good way to back up my work. Given my picky nature about blogging and the fact that HEY is lacking in customization or the ability to use your own domain, it was always a long shot that it would stick, anyway.

Newsletters

Something that HEY World gets absolutely right is the ability to post across delivery mechanisms and have it look virtually the same on every client. However, I don't need HEY to do that. Both Micro.blog and Ghost do something similar, just a bit differently. For the purposes of this post, I will stick with describing Micro.blog, since that is currently my blogging platform of choice.

Micro.blog gives you three options for how to implement newsletters, and I think they are all well-designed for different use cases.

1. Send email for each long blog post with a title
2. Collect all short microblog posts and long posts into a weekly email
3. Collect posts from a category into a monthly email

I have been using the second option to produce an email digest each week, for folks who may not be following my blog via RSS. I'm going to switch to sending out long posts via email, like I was doing with HEY World. This means I can take the time to write longer posts with greater thought put into them. I won't feel as if I need to fill the week with link posts while dodging the outrage.

Moving forward

I love writing out my feelings. It's cathartic, therapeutic and most of all, fun. I want to continue to do so, but I need to focus more on less. This was the idea I had when I briefly shifted to HEY World, but there's no reason I can't do it on Micro.blog. That platform allows me to post whatever I want and distribute that content in the ways that make the most sense.

Lois M. Collins has a profile of Elizabeth Bruenig, whom I’ve long admired, for Deseret News. The basis for the piece is Bruenig’s unusual (for these days, anyway) blend of faith and politics. She doesn’t fit neatly into the proscribed categories that we have packaged up for easy consumption and advocacy. She’s strongly left on economics but somewhat to the right socially. As a staunch Catholic, she's pro-life and has done quite a bit of investigative journalism on the death penalty.

Elizabeth Bruenig makes no apologies. Not for her progressive politics, not for her Catholic faith and certainly not for having children at an age some of the left intelligentsia find unfashionable.

Though Bruenig’s blend of progressive economic politics, socially conservative politics and Catholicism seems out-of-place in the modern zeitgeist, I personally don’t find it inconsistent at all. After all, progressive politics tends to be much more supportive of serving the poor and disenfranchised, which was one of Jesus’ major concerns. He taught us to serve the poor in particularly urgent language in parables such as the one commonly referred to as The Sheep and the Goats. While some Christian sects like to talk about people going to hell if they don’t accept Christ as their savior, Jesus himself indicated that you would be headed that way if you don’t help your fellow human beings who are struggling in this particular parable.

Jesus was pretty conservative on social issues like marriage. He believed that, for instance, divorce was to be avoided in all but the most extreme situations. Historically, this has been the position of the church and the governments that came from majority Judeo-Christian backgrounds. It wasn’t until California instituted the no-fault divorce just decades ago that it became easy to get a divorce in the United States.

She likes to quote Lena Dunham (in some ways, her political opposite), who said, “I’m not for everyone.”

In fact, Bruenig’s alignment with the values of the early Christian church shows how disordered our modern political divisions of left and right really are when compared against a background of religious faith. To paraphrase a recent statement by blogger Robbie Sapunarich, I’m not sure we should take our terminology from the French Revolution. The modern political binaries are arbitrary or sometimes practical, like drawing boundaries for a state or town. They are only there because we have erected them for the purposes of lowering cognitive load and making it easier to digest complex issues. Why think individual issues out – with all of their nuances and different applications to different people – when you can just get a whole package of beliefs handed to you?

I read posts from a lot of people who are either cleanly on the one side or the other. You can guess what their opinion will be on any given political issue, based on the package they have accepted. While I like these people (or I wouldn’t be following them in the first place), I have to take what they are writing with a lower expectation that they’ve actually thought the issue through. Maybe they have, but it’s more likely they’re just regurgitating what their favorite political team’s talking points. It’s going to be somewhat less interesting to me at best (frustrating, at worst) if someone doesn’t have their own, unique take on things.

As Bruenig has discovered, mostly through her presence on social media, a lot of people don’t like independent thinkers. Peter Wason didn’t pull the theory of confirmation bias from nowhere. Most people have a reactionary view on hot button issues, and like to read whatever confirms their initial view. They don’t like challenges to that view, which put them in a defensive posture. Online, this defensiveness can come out as rage.

It’s good that Bruenig doesn’t put too much stock in the social media outrage machine, because she wouldn’t have lasted this long in the online world if she did. She likes to quote Lena Dunham (in some ways, her political opposite), who said, “I’m not for everyone.”

Captured Tracks recording artist Scout Gillett covers the standout Broadcast track "Come On Let's Go" on her newest covers EP, One To Ten. I liked the original version of this song, despite the fact that I am always feeling like I'm going to get Broadcast mixed up with Stereolab (it's the same sixties space age bachelor pad vibe). It’s an interesting choice for for Gillett, who also covers Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” on the EP — which sounds completely fitting for her retro country-pop feel.

Here Gillett doesn't shed the Broadcast sound, but adds some punch to the track. There’s a noisy but slow guitar solo that heats things up. Gillett mimes shredding the guitar using a broom in the video. It’s obvious she’s having a lot of fun with this recording, which was originally done in September 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic, for a tribute compilation to the late Broadcast singer, Trish Keenan. Since the order of the day was to stay home and stay well, any movement outside of out that space was carefully calculated. So the lyrics to the song, which go: “what’s the point in wasting time, with people you’ll never know,” really spoke to Gillette about the current state of affairs. You had to be judicious about who you spent time with and the song, written decades ago, pointed straight at that situation. Gillette's voice sounds less coy than Keenan's does on the song, and she compensates in the video by nodding affirmatively during the chorus. As she sings "come on let's go," heaven help you if you aren't at least curious to see where Gillett is going to take you.

My first thought when read (at the end of a long day of work) that Elon Musk had purchased Twitter, was some measure of disbelief. I'm almost embarrassed to admit the second thought that popped into my head after reading the news. Yep, it is definitely with some shame that I tell you my disbelief was quickly followed by relief. I'm aware that may be surprising. It surprised me, too.

I'm not certain that I've ever really spent much time writing about Elon Musk, but my feelings toward the man are not very positive. I have spent a lot of time (maybe too much) writing about Twitter, and its many faults. Recently, I took a Lenten break from Twitter and, when I came back, found it pretty unappealing. Someone once joked that the game of Twitter was to not be the person who was being talked about on Twitter on any given day. On the day I came back — Easter Sunday — that person (or those people, rather) was a crew of zealous, evangelistic Christians singing songs about Jesus on an airplane. My whole timeline was filled with what the extremely online call "takes" about this incident. It didn't leave me wanting more. After seeing recommendations from Twitter, which, as usual, seemed designed to spark outrage, I felt even less inclined to log in. So, I just haven't been on the platform much during this Eastertide.

In the midst of my neglect of the Twitter timeline, though, one thing that has been weighing on my mind is Twitter's financial future. You see, I'm a TWTR shareholder, conflicted about my distrust of the platform and being financially intertwined with its fate. I have been waiting for a chance to sell my shares at a reasonable price and get out. I now have a way to cash in my chips, not having gained much over the years, but at least some. If I wanted to wash my hands of the whole affair, I could be done with Twitter today. It is somewhat liberating.

When I started writing this post, I thought I was probably mostly alone in my feelings. Then I read this from M.G. Seigler.

And with the market now in a state of turbulence, the chaos of Elon Musk must have in some ways felt welcoming. A chokehold that felt like a warm embrace.

I can't come up with a better metaphor than "a chokehold that felt like a warm embrace." An online place that I used to love has fallen into the hands of a billionaire with an ax to grind, and I feel fine.

Sometimes Apple Music inspires me by algorithmically playing fitting sequential songs after a self-made playlist. This happened recently when I had been listening to some tracks I had stuck together and it followed them up with a Chromeo and then a Cut Copy song. I never would have thought to put the two together, but the combo worked really well. I could imagine myself DJ’ing — spinning those tracks back to back to get people moving. That was the inspiration for this playlist, Dance Music For Introverts. It's a bit of a misnomer, since some of it is just straight up dance music, but it works.

I continue to be amazed by how tightly Apple Music has been tuned since it first debuted. Obviously, whenever you are dealing with machine learning, the more data you have, the better the recommendation engine can be. In this case, after listening to the first few songs I added to the playlist, I was literally thinking, "I need to put Toro Y Moi’s 'New Beat' on here." Before I could even do that, Apple Music played the song when the playlist had ended.

That's entertainment.

I look at Easter not just as a day, but as a kickoff, if you will, for Eastertide. I see it as somewhat analogous to New Year's Day. Resolutions start then, and don't end when the day is over. Eastertide is a time to look at renewal in your life. If that renewal is simply a present fact, as is my continuing recovery from ME/CFS — thanks be to God — then it is a time for celebration. Sometimes, though, you may have to gently invite that renewal.

Easter is the most important holiday in the Christian calendar and it means a lot to me and other believers. This year, I wanted to write something to convey the beauty of Easter, but I didn’t come across any articles that really sparked my imagination and spurred my writing. Then I realized, while sitting in church, that I had actually already read a post that spoke to me about Easter in way that was relevant to my recent experiences – that I wanted to share.

Peggy Noonan writes for The Wall Street Journal about “America’s Most Tumultuous Holy Week,” which she believes was the week in April 1865. To make her case, she subtitles her piece: “On Palm Sunday, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln was dead by Easter.” It’s a pretty strong argument for a superlative level of tumult. What impressed me about her account of the surrender of General Lee to General Grant was the amount of grace that the North gave to the South after such a bloody war. The reason for grace wasn’t that the figures in the North thought that the cause of the South was anything but criminally unjust.

Grant would write in his memoirs “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know.” His own feelings, which had earlier been jubilant, were now “sad and depressed.” He couldn’t rejoice at the downfall of a foe that had “suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard those lines before in the Ken Burns Civil War documentary because when I read it, I hear it said, in one of Burns’ reliable narrator’s voices. It shows the disdain that the Union soldiers must have had for the Confederate cause. Yet, when it came time to negotiate the terms of surrender, they were merciful terms. The Confederate soldiers were allowed to keep their personal arms, take a horse or a donkey, were fed and sent on their way back to farm their lands. Noonan relates, "Grant’s commissary chief later asked, 'Were such terms ever before given by a conqueror to a defeated foe?'" Perhaps they were, but that kind of treatment is not the standard following a war.

The United States perhaps would not have remained united following the war, were it not for those terms. As I remember why Christ died for us, I like think His sacrifice to earn forgiveness for our sins can be best celebrated by forgiving others. At a time when bickering in this country happens over seemingly everything, this Easter reminds me that we can be reconciled over even some of the most difficult things.

Other than writing, I have been trying to avoid too much screen time. This week, I turned to paper craft and made my favorite Transformer, Galvatron.

We are rapidly approaching the end of Holy Week for Christians. Happy Easter to everyone celebrating! To my Tamil friends, Puthaandu Nalvalthukkal!

For those who are into bullet journaling, the Creative Block Party has a bunch of freebies for the price of an email address. I like some of the ideas they have for habit trackers.

I have struggled to find a habit tracker interesting enough for me to stick to it and I’m hoping that I can use some of these to complete my circles. Most of my habits will revolve around reading, writing and prayer.

Anna Havron urges you to create a personal “Yes and No” list to have a framework with which to guide your life. Such a list helps you document what you are committed to doing and what you are committed to not doing. Here’s a good example from Anna’s own list that I’m trying to put into practice:

Respond, don’t react. Whenever possible, I iterate on my reaction to something important for 12-24 hours before talking about it. Applies to work emails too.

I’m currently in the middle of watching Ken Burns’ documentary on Ben Franklin. This reminds me of Franklin using his 13 virtues to guide his daily life and decision making. He had 12 virtues, but was bragging about how good he had gotten at implementing them that his friend suggested adding a 13th: humility. Franklin thought the best way to introduce a touch more humility was to imitate Jesus and Socrates.

I was going to order a bamboo back scratcher to get at those hard-to-reach itches this week, but Etsy sellers are asking their customers not to buy from the site between April 11 and April 18. Mia Sato profiles the sellers from the online marketplace Etsy who are going on strike to protest changes to the platform. She interviews a seller who is participating in the strike and for whom Etsy is not what it once was.

But for the last few years, changes at Etsy that she feels hurt sellers were piling up — rising fees, mandatory marketing programs, and an influx of drop shippers — and the marketplace no longer felt like somewhere where artisan products and hand-picked vintage items were prioritized.

I have also noticed a change in Etsy over the years. It sometimes feels more like eBay than the online crafts fair it used to be. I can't speak to the fees and other things that sellers are protesting, but I've definitely seen the impact of the drop shippers. It sometimes seems like you may be just as likely to come across a mass-produced item as you are something bespoke and handmade.

→ Etsy Sellers Will Go On Strike In April And Want Customers To Boycott | The Verge

Greg Morris realizes he doesn't need a blog, but ponders how much it benefits him, anyway.

The benefits of it run far deeper than the sum of its parts. No person should judge their blog based on the number of views the posts get because it always serves a different purpose. It allows you to publish whatever it is you want to publish, get it out of your brain and own it from start to end. I don’t need a blog, but everyone should have one.

I totally agree with Morris that everyone should have a blog. I’m trying to get a friend who is currently sending out thoughts about the situation in Ukraine, globalization, etc. to an email distribution list. His emails are insightful and informative, and I’d love to be able to point people to a blog post that lays out what he is sending through email.

→ I Don’t Need A Blog | Greg Morris

There has been recent talk of people going into "goblin mode," a pandemic-associated mode of isolation and hunkering down. Sam George from the University of Hertfordshire argues that this is a mischaracterization of the goblin.

Most goblins depicted in literature and folklore are active, playing pranks and generally causing trouble for the humans around them. They do not sit passively at home, surrounded by creature comforts, lazing the day away.

Instead, George says we should look to the vampire for a more direct comparison. Vampires have gone from being thought of as hideous, odious creatures to being sex symbols (think the Twilight series). We too can come out from our dark cocoons and into the light.

But over the last 200 years, Vampires in popular culture have evolved from plague-ridden creatures like Nosferatu to sparkling, aspirational sex symbols. Instead of holing up and resigning to a fate forever in goblin mode, we should follow the example set by vampires and aim to emerge from the pandemic as better versions of ourselves.

George has fun with the mythology behind these menacing creatures being brought into contemporary times as points of reference for our behaviors.

From the blog

The Slide from Epistemic Bubble to Echo Chamber

We are trees rooted alongside each other, and tearing up the roots of one tree threatens to encroach on the rootedness of another.

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

Derek Thompson wrote a newsletter edition for the Altantic about population growth collapsing in the US. The statistics he cites are alarming.

U.S. growth didn’t slowly fade away: It slipped, and slipped, and then fell off a cliff. The 2010s were already demographically stagnant; every year from 2011 to 2017, the U.S. grew by only 2 million people. In 2020, the U.S. grew by just 1.1 million. Last year, we added only 393,000 people.

I know that there are some people who won't see this as a bad thing. After all, population growth leads to competition for resources and overpopulation. The humans who exist now can't all get access to appropriate resources. People still freeze to death outside of homes that could keep them warm. Unfortunates starve while others eat until they are stuffed. Equality seems further and further away in many places.

So why do we need more people in the world and specifically in the countries in Europe and Japan and the US, where birth rates are declining and population growth through immigration is sometimes viewed with suspicion? Thompson is careful to state that he thinks that ultimately, family planning is a matter for individuals to decide, even as the macro-level consequences may be economically devastating. He doesn't shy away from elaborating on those consequences, though.

The implications of permanently slumped population growth are wide-ranging. Shrinking populations produce stagnant economies. Stagnant economies create wonky cultural knock-on effects, like a zero-sum mentality that ironically makes it harder to pursue pro-growth policies. (For example, people in slow-growth regions might be fearful of immigrants because they seem to represent a threat to scarce business opportunities, even though immigration represents these places’ best chance to grow their population and economy.) The sector-by-sector implications of declining population would also get very wonky very fast.

He calls this course we are on as leading us into a "demographic danger zone." In another piece that summarizes the problem, potential causes and predicted outcomes, Scott Lanman lays out the challenges that Japan is experiencing due to their extremely low population growth.

In Japan, employers often struggle to fill job vacancies. Spending on health care and pensions has swollen Japan’s public debt to more than twice the size of its economy. The International Monetary Fund has estimated that the country’s annual economic growth could be 1 percentage point lower for the next three decades because of Japan’s aging population. That means the country’s economy, forecast to expand 1 percent this year and next, may stagnate further.

To mix metaphors, Japan is the canary in the coal mine for other nations who are heading down this road. It's a scary prospect when the younger population cannot produce enough to support programs that take care of the elderly. Thompson mentions the situation pitting the younger generation against the older generation in his post and let us hope it doesn't come to that.

The religion connection

One surprising thing that both pieces have in common is that they both ignore the correlation between religiosity and fertility. Though not completely universal, in the majority of cases, fertility declines along with religiosity. Expectations of gender roles plays a part here, with more conservative religious expressions tending to have the greatest fertility. A study of the relationship between the two factors in 2002 takes the data that shows the correlation and examines causation.

Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), we show that women who report that religion is "very important" in their everyday life have both higher fertility and higher intended fertility than those saying religion is "somewhat important" or "not important." Factors such as unwanted fertility, age at childbearing, or degree of fertility postponement seem not to contribute to religiosity differentials in fertility. This answer prompts more fundamental questions: what is the nature of this greater "religiosity"? And why do the more religious want more children? We show that those saying religion is more important have more traditional gender and family attitudes and that these attitudinal differences account for a substantial part of the fertility differential. We speculate regarding other contributing causes.

With traditional attitudes about gender declining along with religiosity, we should probably be worried about the trend. Those who would either celebrate the rise of secularism or at the very least shrug their shoulders should be informed about the overall results of the shift. Demographic changes brought about by attitudinal and lifestyle changes are poised to have destructive consequences. While Thompson may very well be correct that the choices about reproduction should be up to individuals, the aggregate of those decisions will effect everyone.

In his book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt examines the group cohesion brought by religion, and the loosening of those ties and ends up in the same place as Thompson and Lanman. Haidt is another secular writer who sees the trend of lower birth rates, but brings different attributional causes to the table. He looks at increasingly irreligious Europe as a cautionary tale.

Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

Haidt doesn’t lay out the outcome of fewer offspring, but it would be surprising if he anticipated anything other than what is predicted by others and reported by Thompson and Lanman. Haidt does get into more specifics about what happens in general when group cohesion dissolves in the absence of religion.

But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for anomie—Durkheim’s word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order.(It means, literally, “normlessness.”) We evolved to live, trade and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.

Haidt uses the metaphor of the elephant and the rider to describe our intuitive and rational selves, respectively. Does the situation he outlines sound familiar? You don’t have to look far to find statistics and analysis about a growing mental health crisis and rise in suicide in the United States. What you don’t typically see is what Emile Durkheim (considered the founder of sociology) observed around the turn of the 20th century, namely that dissolving group cohesion along with the ties of religious affiliations correlate directly to the negative mental health outcomes to which we are now bearing witness.

The mainstream media, being mostly secular, tends to avoid the potential causality of these problems being the weakening institutions of religion. However, there is plenty of evidence which which to make the case that there is a relatively linear relationship between this phenomenon and a number of troubling societal trends.

With no formal announcement (whoops), Wordpress.com changed their pricing significantly, removing the paid tiers for personal blogging and leaving nothing in between the free plan and the $180 Business plan. I've often thought that Wordpress doesn't want to be in the business of personal blogging. Before they recently made the switch to block-based themes, most of their newer themes on Wordpress.com were geared towards businesses. It was clear from the descriptions of the themes and the static homepages advertising businesses that they weren't built with blogging in mind.

As Manton Reece points out, this move makes Micro.blog an even better value proposition at $5 a month or $50 a year.

As Micro.blog hosting has improved, I’ve thought our $5/month plan compares favorably with WordPress.com’s similarly-priced plans. Surprised that WordPress.com has now gutted their pricing lineup, with nothing in between $0 and $180/year. $5 to me is still simple and obvious.

Another reason you may want to think about blogging on Micro.blog is the fact that Elon Musk is now the largest shareholder of Twitter.

Given that he has criticized the platform for free speech and is a heavy and popular user, it is unlikely that Musk is buying Twitter stock as a passive investment.

"We would expect this passive stake as just the start of broader conversations with the Twitter board/management that could ultimately lead to an active stake and a potential more aggressive ownership role of Twitter," Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said in a client note early Monday.

As a soon-to-be-former Twitter shareholder, I can state that this news is not comforting.

Last week, Twitter banned the conservative satirical site The Babylon Bee for what it termed “hate speech.” Specifically, the “satire” involved misgendering U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine as a man. I’m not sure what’s satirical about that, but it seems cruel and certainly not at all funny. As a sign of the coming apocalypse, Elon Musk was interviewed by the Babylon Bee in December 2021. Is it possible that this ban was the act which spurred Musk into thinking of buying into Twitter to change its direction?

These changes to the biggest blogging and microblogging platforms, respectively, should give people pause. Now might be the right time to switch platforms to one like Micro.blog, where you can create long and short-form content. M.b. has a reasonable pricing structure, and you own your blog and possibly domain, with plenty of export options if you decide to move it elsewhere.

At Micro Camp 2021, Patrick Rhone did a talk on writing a book and he delved into the topic of blogging, which he framed as writing essays for an online audience. His point was that if you are a blogger, you are a writer. A writer for those who read your content online. It was an inspirational talk in how it shifted the way you can think about your writing and your readers. A little change in perspective can go a long way when you are trying to motivate yourself to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, in this case.

One of the things I’ve noticed when writing online is that people read very differently and prefer to get their content across different mediums. Even within my family, my writing is more likely to be read by certain individuals if it is presented in a way that they prefer. For instance:

• My mom is most likely to read something if she sees a link on Twitter. Less so if the content is delivered via email, partially because her inbox is out-of-control.
• My sister is more likely to read what I’ve written if it comes through email. She is not on very many social media platforms, and won’t see anything I’ve posted to Twitter.
• My wife is more likely to read an email, as well. She is heavily on Twitter, and follows a lot of people, so sometimes my posts get lost in the stream.

It’s apparent that how I share something and on what platform is important, if I want it to be accessible. My preference is that content is made available via:

1. The open web (for general traffic and new readers)
2. RSS (for the more tech savvy - this is my preferred way of reading)
3. Social media (short posts to syndicate to services like Micro.blog and Twitter and a good way of getting public comments)
4. Email (for folks who like newsletters and for email replies, which are a good way to get private comments)

There are four solutions of which I am aware that do all the above well. Write.as, Ghost, HEY World and Micro.blog. I know a lot of people like Write.as, which has a social component, somewhat similar to, but not as complete as Micro.blog and also has email options for blog posts. I haven’t tried Write.as, because honestly I don’t love the aesthetics and the theme or app design. I have tried Ghost, both self-hosted and the Ghost Pro hosted solution, several times. Although, I ran into a lot of trouble with Mailgun (for newsletters) and upgrades with self-hosted Ghost, so I don’t recommend that solution. Ghost Pro was really nice: increasingly stable and reliable with a set of features that was powerful but didn’t overwhelm. Their support team was responsive and helpful. Ghost is built for bloggers who want to “monetize their content,” though, and I’m not in that group. I’m writing because I enjoy it. I don’t want to strategize about expanding my audience, something Ghost is always pushing. So, for now, I’m sticking with Micro.blog and HEY World, the former for its customizability and social component, the latter for its complete lack of those features and its simplicity.

I’m grateful that blogging services are starting to take into account all the ways people want to read writing from an independent publisher. This is especially helpful when, let’s face it, traditional blog commenting systems are not great. They invite half-baked responses (I was guilty of this, back in the day) instead of real conversation. Don’t even get me started on anonymous comments, which remind me most of someone yelling from a car window as they pass you by on the road. With email and some of the micro-blogging platforms, the discourse is improved, both privately and publicly, because of the robust ability of those systems to handle discussion and the level of accountability that comes with using a real identity (Twitter can sometimes be an exception here).

Even with the popularity of social media, it has never been a better time to consider blogging. There are all sorts of ways to reach those who may want to read your thoughts.