If someone is following you on Substack, there is no email address, and if you want to switch services, you won’t be able to take the followers with you. That’s not a newsletter. It’s social media.
Manton Reece, the creator of Micro.blog, talks about the journey that led him to build a platform that enables users to apply the IndieWeb principle of first posting on their own blog, and then strategically cross-posting or sharing links on social media. Obviously, topics such as ActivityPub, the AT protocol, and the Fediverse in general were also discussed. I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed producing this episode.
Early today, I had a wonderful conversation with @manton@manton.org about #Microblog, #IndieWeb, and #ActivityPub. It will be released in a couple of days as episode 4 of my podcast, as well as a video on my YouTube channel.
I often talk about how starting a YouTube channel meant the end of my podcast, but yesterday, while jogging, I realized that something similar had already happened to me. When I started my podcast, I gradually stopped blogging.
The Way Back Machine has been my go-to website lately as I’m trying to figure out what happened to my online presence. It’s a challenge because I used different URLs throughout the years and was never that popular online. This means that there are many gaps in the Internet Archive. However, the transition from only blog posts to podcast episodes mixed with blog posts to finally only podcast episodes is evident.
It seems like the podcast was taking up more and more of my time, which in turn meant the end of blogging. Then, when I moved to YouTube, keeping a blog section on my site no longer made sense, and I moved to a more institutional website format. At the same time, social media was becoming more popular, and I probably started using only it to share content.
The problem is that most of that online past has been erased forever. Some of the services simply disappeared, and other times I closed my accounts. Fortunately, starting in 2008, I’ve been using Evernote to back up some of the content I was publishing. It’s not everything, but it’s enough to slowly re-create a portion of my online past on my own site.
What’s interesting is that the process of recreating my past is awakening my old passion for blogging. You are not seeing many recent publications here because I am spending most of the time filling in the gaps in the timeline by reformatting and republishing the old content I have in Evernote.
It seems like this is going to last forever, but I’m committed to taking it one step at a time. However, I’m not taking any chances this time. All my old content is being moved to Obsidian first, and then I upload it to Micro.blog using the Micro.publish plugin. This means that I have a local copy in an open format and an online version that I can also export if needed. And after a while, I came up with a workflow that I’m happy with and will soon share with you in a video.
You might be wondering why I’m wasting time on this. Actually, I have already asked myself that question, and I was unable to come up with any rational answer. But it feels good to have my past published in a space that I own and control. My domain and my website.
Anyway, if you also find that comforting, you might want to learn more about IndieWeb.
