So….what’s all this about? The global trend seems to be towards shorter, punchier content comprised mostly of soundbites and quotations. Why actively start producing posts that are lengthier, more meandering and less catchy?

Well, first of all..I can’t decide on the term to use. Short-form content sites seem to encourage a verb based around the name of the company. “Tweet” for Twitter, “Skeet” for Bluesky (whatever that means)… X has….”Xit”? I don’t know. I think that “post” is the only acceptable term for whatever this is. Is it an “article”? That sounds formal and pretentious. “Content” sounds disposable and temporary, like a Dan Brown novel or a Richard Littlejohn column. “Journal” sounds private and not very serious.

Perhaps I need to decide what exactly the point of all this is. Do I want to be serious? Yes. The fact my very first post was about a dead pet should make that fairly clear. But not too serious. I’d like to be able to write about thoughts I’ve had for some time, or very minor issues which clearly don’t affect the world at large and most people wouldn’t be able to relate to.

I think perhaps it’s due to a fundamental difference in the way “social media” works compared to Internet 1.0 as we’re apparently calling it now. The “Wild West Internet” before the walled gardens began to be erected. I’m sure many of us remember LiveJournal and it’s various copycats and imitators. Anybody could create an account, say what they were thinking, and send it off into the world for people to see. Or not. View counts were a thing but they didn’t seem very important. “Sharing” a journal was possible but not very practical. Often times absolutely nobody would see your posts. But that was okay. That isn’t why you were doing it. Sure, you might have a small collection of friends who would routinely check up on you and comment on a shared experience, but by and large they weren’t the kind of place that would end up with a hundred thousand followers and could destabilize a country if you said the wrong thing.

Interoperability was encouraged. Anybody could read what you said, unless you made your account private but almost nobody did that as it seemed to defeat the purpose of writing in the first place. We had RSS and Atom feeds if you wanted to aggregate multiple people together, and bullying wasn’t really a thing as your snarky or hostile comment would only be seen by people who saw the original post in the first place. Places like Google Reader would let you collect together dozens or even hundreds of people in one place and make it easy to see when people updated. The actual uploading of journals was perhaps a little trickier than it is now, but viewing them was easy.

At the time, the only walled garden that had any traction was AOL. But they weren’t taken very seriously. You had the Internet, and you had AOL, and they largely kept themselves to themselves which everybody was fine with. If people wanted to pay to stay amongst other like-minded individuals, then that was up to them. Of course this didn’t last, as AOL began giving it’s users access to the wider Internet. I used to be on Usenet for a few years, but that was seen as something completely different. Journals were for you to post your thoughts and feelings….and Usenet was for chatting and discussions. Of course that was killed because there was no money to be made from it and carrying Usenet traffic was expensive for ISPs (especially the Binaries groups). Google stepped in with it’s Groups service but I’m pretty sure only a minority of people migrated. In fact I’ve just seen that only last year Groups stopped giving access to Usenet for it’s users. Great.

Now, everything is a walled garden. Facebook. Instagram. Snapchat. Linkedin. X. Threads. Tiktok. Youtube. Reddit. Discord. Twitch. WeChat. Pinterest. Weibo. VK. Tumblr. Perhaps Bluesky and Mastodon are something of a grey area because even though they seem like a walled garden, they aren’t underneath. Bluesky looks and acts like an old-fashioned Twitter clone even down to them providing constantly changing rules about what you can and can’t say, depending on the whim of whoever happens to be in power at the time. In theory anybody could take the code and produce their own Bluesky clone without the restrictions, but we know how this goes. Nobody will. If anybody tries to start a social media clone, they will almost certainly fail because they can’t get anywhere near the critical mass of users. And Mastodon…well, it means well with it’s decentralised approach, but it’s just far too intimidating for everyday users to get onboard with. Too much choice. People want to be able to just choose a username, pick a password and get on with it.

There’s also the quotation “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.”. Ever heard that one? Apparently the saying goes all the way back to 1973 to describe passive users of free television stations. Never has it been more true. Social media is all about advertising and selling ad space. Every change in policy or tweak to how the system works is designed to maximise revenue. I’m sure you know that outrage is good for attention. It doesn’t matter what people say, as long as people come to hear them say it. Then you can sell an ad for energy drinks in the sidebar. Users are not encouraged to be thoughtful or incisive. They are encouraged to be topical and outrageous in order to get attention. And I’m sorry, but I don’t think that makes for very good, thought-provoking articles or posts.

The character limit on Twitter was seen as novel at the time and I suppose it was. Maybe, just maybe there was a genuine desire to encourage people to be to-the-point. Or there may have been more cynical reasons. Shorter posts take up less server space. Shorter posts mean people can read more in less time. Shorter posts remove nuance and subtlety. That last one is a deal-breaker for me. It’s very easy to be misunderstood on social media when you don’t have the space to provide context for your thought. People who make ten-post-long threads on X to express their feelings aren’t using the service in the way it was intended. If you have more to say than can be expressed in a single Xit, then perhaps this isn’t the service for you? I also frequently found myself having to alter my thought patterns and writing style purely to fit into the character limit. And that’s not healthy for creativity. It makes people seem blunter, less well-rounded and sometimes downright emotionally stunted. But they may not be – it could purely because they’ve removed all the adjectives in order to keep it within the limit.

Then there’s the issue of para-social relationships. I’m not egotistical to think that I have one with anybody. I’ve never been popular enough, or controversial enough, or talented enough, or creative enough to have enough followers for it to be a thing. But the concept still appears because social media encourages two-way interaction. When a journal was posted, sure people could comment if they wanted to, but that was as far as it went. It didn’t give attention to the commenter, it didn’t make them feel like they were friends with the original poster, and it could be easily removed if it was off-topic or inappropriate. Now everything on social media is treated equally. A comment about your guinea pig, or a comment about the situation in Gaza carry equal weight, and both can be re-posted by others, with sarcastic or offensive commentary, and before you know where you are it’s gone viral with your name attached and there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s also a good chance the commentator did it deliberately to draw attention to their own account. Commentators have been raised to the level of the original poster, and that just seems odd to me. Even online newspaper articles frequently include comments sections purely so they can get more viewers to their ads. Have you ever seen the comments sections on BBC News articles? They’re a cesspool of misinformation, bigotry and spelling mistakes. I don’t even know why the BBC have them given they don’t serve ads. You can disallow comments on social media posts on places like Bluesky, but again that seems to defeat the point. Why post there if you don’t want people to share and comment?

Finally, social media seems deliberately designed to be as transitory, shallow, temporary and superficial as possible. You don’t have an archive. You have a timeline. Everything appears and then vanishes within a few minutes or hours, depending on how many people you follow. If you go away for a few days you might as well delete your account and start again because that’s all gone now. I thoroughly detest artists who exclusively post to social media. Not only does it make it more likely that I’ll miss something that I really like, but you also seem to be saying that your art is disposable and not worth keeping around. Is that really how you feel, or is social media the only way you feel you can communicate with your fans any more? Do you really want that relationship? I’m pretty sure artists didn’t used to write to the people who bought their paintings and say “Hey! I’m glad you bought my work. How about you tell your friends and neighbours about it?”. There’s nothing wrong with Livestreams. Some people want to see how the sausage is made. But it does feel like rather than elevating the audience to the level of the performer, we’ve dragged them down to our level. Now rather than being on a stage, the actors are instead in the middle of a crowd having to shout to get our attention.

So I’m going back to my original long-form posts. But only when appropriate. A pithy comment doesn’t need a thousand-word essay. I’ll still happily repost things I’ve seen that I think are important or interesting. But where to go? I’ve used this service before, and I like the fact that you can link it to your own domain. As you can see I’ve gone for a very minimalist, easy to read style. I’m old-school Internet. Pictures waste bandwidth. Only illustrate when appropriate. And there are no ads. This is a paid account. You are not the product. I am. And I’m okay with that because that’s a decision I made myself.

I know this makes things a little one-sided compared to something like Bluesky. But I’m fine with that. I don’t live for views or re-posts. Read, or don’t. Sure, the occasional comment is appreciated but that’s not why I’m here. Maybe from time to time I’ll post something you find interesting. LiveJournal was very well named. It’s an online diary which you’re allowing other people to read from time to time. It’s a catalogue of your thoughts and feelings, generally about things that have already happened – not things which are currently ongoing or about to take place.

Apparently LiveJournal is now a wholly owned Russian company with it’s servers in Russia and it’s T.O.S follow Russian law. Somehow that seems appropriate. Can’t go back.

(Incidentally, I’m not happy about the “Share This” block underneath here with links to X and Facebook – I’m trying to work out how to turn them off but WP gives conflicting advice and nothing seems to work. The Bluesky/Mastodon/Share buttons are SUPPOSED to be there)

Social Media icon by abimanyu from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)