Twitter is taking an awfully long time to die, but its death is widely seen as inevitable.
Some people have already fled to other social media sites, e.g. Mastodon, or the newer Bluesky or Threads. I did too, to be fair.
But the whole idea, that my stuff lives on the servers owned by people manifestly committed to shitty behavior, still feels bad.
POSSE is essentially a fancy new acronym for a very old idea - publish and syndicate content. The tools, like RSS and Atom, have been around for years. ActivityPub is really neat, but it’s an evolution of an existing concept.
So what does all this mean?
Despite my depression and anxiety, some spark inside my soul doesn’t let me just go quietly into the night and stop posting anything. So I’m redoing the ol’ blog yet again, this time built with the fast static site generator Zola. While it doesn’t have the flexibility of tools like Metalsmith or Gatsby, it’s far more robust, and right now that’s what I need. Just a tool to turn some Markdown into HTML and post it somewhere.
I’ve got almost all of my old content sitting in Github somewhere, and I’ll be importing some of it over. I don’t have confidence in everything, but some of it was okay.
I’ve got new stuff I want to talk about, like progressivism and Charlie Chan and comic book creation.
I’ve got reactions to things, and opinions, and thoughts and hopes and fears.
All of that is going to live here, at this URL. It’s going to be spread to social media, or shared on Discord, or whatever. It’s more work, but I can live with that.