The demise of the birdsite and the rise of Mastodon and the Fediverse generally has reminded a lot of us of what we liked about the internet in the old days. Some of us seem to really be enjoying tinkering with standing up and managing our own Mastodon instance, but even more importantly we’re disovering that owning your own presense and platform rather than relying on some megacorp’s algorithm for engagement is feeling a lot more empowering. I and a lot of folks I know are having such better quality interactions with people on the fediverse.

It was approaching midnight last night on New Year’s Eve and because I have nothing to prove, I was already comfy in bed reading crap on the internet when I came across the Bring Back Blogging pact. I completely agree with the premise that we have an interesting oppportunity right now to bring back the more open and distributed internet of the late 90s and early aughts. Despite (and probably partly because of) working for FAANGs, I see the need to diversify our compute and data infrastructure.

I used to write a lot more and I’m finding myself more and more out of practice with long form writing over the last five or six years, so I thought this was a good idea to try to commit to write more and bring back the general decentralization of information on the internet. I’ve been down this path before of reskinning my blog and hoping to write more. Let’s see if it takes this time.