For the record, I think committing to the fediverse puts us in a weird transition place.
On the one side, centralized social media platforms don't give you a choice. You get a lot of convenience but also a lot of constraints. But you take what features they give you. They control your identity and your content.
On the other side is the open web. Where you can mostly do what you want. But you have to do it yourself, and it's often a ton of work.
In general, the tools for web publishing tools are great now. Standing up a website is easy. You can grab a theme and get a nice design going. You can even heavily customize things. And you don't have to write any code. My website is on square space. I was even able to create a simple contact form and have all of the submissions collected and cataloged for me. That used to be hard and now it's not. https://marcorogers.com/
But these days, there are a bunch of other things we want to do besides web publishing. We've seen all of the other kinds of cool capabilities that are possible. But mostly because it's offered by for profit companies. Streaming media, complex editing tasks, data management, games, art, etc, etc. We wanna do all this stuff too. But we can't do it easily in our own space that we control. The tools just aren't there yet.
Social media is probably the thing that is closest to being doable today. I have my own social identity under my own domain. social.polotek.net. I control the domain and I can put whatever I want here. That feels nice. But I don't really know how to make it into what I want.
For example, mastodon and bluesky are different platforms. I have to have two separate identities. I don't care about either one of these entities. I'm just want to be me in both places.
I'm closest with mastodon right now. I have my own instance and I can publish what I want. People have to come looking for me and decide to follow. But bluesky people can't decide to follow me if they want to. The arbitrary boundaries of their platform prevent that.
I just don't really need mastodon or bluesky to be an intermediary between me and somebody who wants to see what I post. And I definitely don't need to publish the same thing in two different places.
Instead I want to just post to my space. In the same way I put up a blog post on my website and I don't have ask anybody first. And whoever wants to come and look at it can do so.
I wanted to do a video about something the other day. I don't wanna be a YouTuber. I don't wanna mess with a bunch of a/v tools. I just want to be part of a conversation in a different community that mostly communicates through video. (The gaming community. Those mofos don't read 😜)
But right now there no great way to just post a video under my own domain, and have it published and discoverable through the platforms where people already congregate around this stuff.
Basically, I don't mind having a representation of my identity and my content on other platforms. But I want it to be a re-publishing of what I put on my own platform. I want a world where you can always find me directly by coming to my site. You can be assured that whatever you saw elsewhere was actually me. And I can be responsible for preserving my online presence, even as these other platforms rise and fall.
At some point I developed a personal policy that I never deleted tweets. I wanted to always be accountable to what I said.
I worked hard to make sure I got my full archive from Twitter. Because eventually I'm gonna do the work to make it available again under a domain that I control. So I can continue to be accountable even if Twitter goes away.
But squarespace can't help me with that. And neither can mastodon. I'm gonna have to do it myself.
@thisismissem I'm realizing maybe "flexible" wasn't the right word. I just want the set of capabilities that I'm thinking of to be easily accessible to me. I think a lot of the puzzle pieces are there. But there is also the work of pulling it together into something that is more usable and accessible.
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