Trying to Reclaim That LiveJournal Feeling

For a few years now, I’ve lamented the death of blogging as a form with a widespread readership. While there’s still a few formats that have similar broadcast capabilities — a lot of my blogging impulses moved over to my newsletter around 2017 — none of them have the same capacity to provoke conversations and follow them as blogging once did. Newsletter responses are private and one-on-one, rather than conversation. Twitter threads move fast, and quickly disappear beneath the surface.

Patreon, which is probably my favourite platform at the moment, has the drawback of being a walled garden, which means the people who read and comment to you really want to be reading your stuff,, but can’t share content around as easily.

Blog still have some legs as a long-form medium, but there’s a mid-range kind of blogging or journaling that’s largely invisible these days. The kind of content that once used to appear on LiveJournal, where you could just show up and talk about what’s on your mind, without formulating the headings and graphics and calls to action that characterise blogging’s dominant mode here in 2022.

Some of my recent reading led me to think about Facebook as a platform, the whole notion of social media as a hypersigil, and what can be done if you use the platform in ways that run counter to norms and expectations. Which has led to an interesting week of using Facebook as a mid-range blogging platform, doing short-bursts of 300 to 500 words.

Since some of it may be of interest to readers here, I’ve pulled together a curated list of links from the last week below.

Going Full Cyborg

Balancing Work and Publishing

Running Before You Can Walk

Preparing to Go Bigger

Putting Money Where My Mouth Is Around Backlist

There’s no telling how long I’ll do this. At the moment, it’s an interesting diversion while my brain is focused on other things, and I expect the Facebook algorithms are sharing it rather widely because I’ve suddenly gone from avoiding the site to using it rather extensively.

But it has been interesting to write stuff and see folks interact with it, in a way that harkens back to a version of the internet I thought lost over a decade ago.