With Twitter going down the drain at an exponential rate thanks to Elon, the microblogging space has become fragmented. If you’ve kept up with recent trends, you may have seen the sudden rise of Threads, and maybe even Mastodon, though the latter has been bubbling up in the tech community for some time now. There’s also Bluesky, Jack Dorsey’s invitation-only Twitter spin-off. Oh, and the heaps of other services that have already existed for years that serve the same primary purpose.
This isn’t a novel idea by any means, but it had me thinking that I should use my personal website (the one you’re reading this on) for these types of posts rather than put all of my eggs in one basket through a proprietary social media platform again.
Right now there aren’t a whole lot of blog posts here. That is partially due to my inability to string together coherent thoughts worth sharing, but also because I wanted this site to host more of my long-form writing. Turns out I tend to only write those about once a year, leading to this wide empty space on the internet that I call home.
My point is, I’m going to try putting in more effort into sharing my thoughts on here as I see fit. This is my section of the web and it doesn’t come with a word-count requirement for publishing.
If you somehow stumbled across this page, maybe you should consider doing the same. With so many tools at our fingertips for creating static websites, it’s wildly easy to get started and post. This website is powered by Jekyll and served by Netlify from a private GitHub repo, but today there are much easier alternatives as well.
For starting out, I can’t not suggest using something like Jekyll, Gatsby, or Hugo (with Git) for your blog, but they have relatively steep learning curves for less technical users who just want to write.
If you don’t want the headache of setting things up the old fashioned way, you can always try Ghost or WordPress, but even those may be overkill for a simple blog; hence why I recommend setting up your own basic site like this one.
One thing I’ll add is that Medium is trash. Don’t write on Medium.
My point being, individuals shouldn’t rely on centralized services like Twitter or Facebook or new trend app for sharing their thoughts. Buy a cheap domain, set up your own website, and blog there with no limitations.
Anyways, this was meant to be much shorter, but it is what it is. If things go according to plan, this site should have some more posts soon enough.