My posts…what goes where?
Am I overthinking it? Of course I’m overthinking it.
Let’s face it, I enjoy trying different ways of publishing and tinkering with the tools for doing so. Once in a while, I spread myself a little too thin and consider drastic consolidation. You know, the dream of One True Blog™.
In an effort to figure this out, I thought I’d write down the types of content I post most frequently, and where that content might belong.
Blog Posts. Blog posts are longer posts of several paragraphs or more, and often include images. You’re soaking in it! This is the easy one, blog posts go here on my main blog at Baty.net.
Daily Notes. Daily Notes are all the little things I think about throughout the day. They’re incomplete, inconsistent, and not ready for prime time. I post these all over the map. I’ve written them on my wiki, at daily.baty.net, and as part of my main blog under the Journal heading. Most recently, they’ve been going to baty.blog because I quite like how that site looks and works (it uses Tinderbox for publishing).
Social Posts. Social posts are a subset of my Daily Notes. They’re the things I want to share socially. I don’t have rules around what qualifies. It’s just me thinking, “Hey, I’d like people to see this.” For many years, this was Twitter’s domain. But later, and up until yesterday, social posts had been going to my Mastodon account.
Photos. Photos have, since 2004, gone to Flickr and, more recently, to Glass. But they also belong everywhere, depending on whether I want to add some context or not.
Yesterday, I restarted my subscription to Micro.blog in hopes of combining a few of the above into a coherent stream at jack.micro.blog. I’m not sure it’s working out the way I’d hoped.
Micro.blog is great because it handles posts of all kinds, and can optionally feed them out to the “fediverse” via ActivityPub. People using Mastodon or other services like it can follow me on Micro.blog just the same as if I were also using a Mastodon account.
So what’s the problem? The problem is that the distinction between things I write as a daily note and the things I write for social networks overlap, but not completely. Many of the things I write on baty.blog are not meant for general consumption. The difference is that on baty.blog, every little thing I write doesn’t end up in someone’s social feed, begging for commentary, likes, or whatever. Sometimes I’d rather not have to chat about (or defend) something I’ve written. Sure, the daily notes are public and available via RSS for the truly interested, but otherwise are mostly just for me and the few lunatics who visit the site or subscribe via RSS.
This means that Micro.blog can’t actually replace Baty.blog. But can it at least replace Mastodon? I think so. My only hesitation is that if I’m not using Micro.blog for all the great things it can do, do I need it at all? The community is fantastic, so interactions there are always pleasant and fun. But it’s kind of like Emacs in a way; If I’m going to use it, I always feel like I should use it for everything. Know what I mean?
I’ll keep fiddling with it, but right now we’re all going to have to deal with me posting to three places: baty.net for blog posts, baty.blog for my daily notes (although this could end up moved to daily.baty.net soon), and jack.micro.blog for social posts.
Am I overthinking it? Of course I’m overthinking it.
OMG I just remembered I wrote basically this same post less than a month ago in Say vs. Share. What is wrong with me? 😆