In the past few weeks, roughly since the mid-November changes at Twitter, my own internet habits have seen the most major shift since I got a smartphone in 2012 (I got one late, I know) or since my social media experience moved from discussion boards and MySpace to Facebook when I started college.
I’ve been mostly using Mastodon for my social media. I’ve also been using my blog, this blog for more of my personal thoughts and feelings about the media I’m going through. This used to just be a marketing tool when I was a lawyer in solo practice, rather than a public defender who doesn’t need to chase down his own clients. As much as I was thinking out and writing out longer form articles, and I’m still proud of articles like the one on the 100-mile constitution-free zone, those articles were still shaped by some of the realities of the algorithms underlying social media and search engines. I would schedule all my blog posts to go live at noon, with pre-written syndication posts for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, because the math said that was the time when I had the most active followers. I picked the topics I wrote about carefully to keep them relevant to the areas of law I practiced while also choosing topics that would grab eyes on a social media feed. It just wasn’t the same as that teenage shouting into the void that was my first experience with the interactive web. Every decision from colors for branding to length of what I wrote was contemplated around getting people to not just read my posts, but to move past them to the contact form to send me their problems so I could decide what to charge to help with them.
The last few weeks have been a sort of return to my early days online, I’ve been chatting with people on my Mastodon account, I’ve been filling my Thunderbird inbox with RSS feeds, and I’ve been writing here about things like my Pathfinder game or a new book I got an early copy of. It’s just me sitting at my table or my desk with a notebook that I’ve scribbled a rough outline onto, my Alphasmart Neo for first drafting, and just throwing my words out into the world like it’s 2004 and I’ve just signed up for MySpace and need to talk about that assignment from English class last week.
It’s been a refreshing change of pace. While the dashboard on my blog tells me that I’ve gotten a number of views on my blog that I would have been ecstatic over a few years ago, there’s been no worry about conversion rates or bounce rates or anything like that. I honestly only have this site because I forgot to cancel the hosting and got charged for another year.
I can just be me, write like me, and it’s a freeing thought. I hope there’s something to interest people here. The contact form and comment section here remain attached to my email, or you can always find me on Mastodon.
This post has gotten a bit ranty, but I had some thoughts about returning to a less walled-garden approach to the internet, and writing things out has always helped me get the random thoughts into focus.
Featured Image is from Maria Reyes-McDonald licensed under CC BY 2.0
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