A year ago I wrote a post about Bluesky and what happens to the things you leave on other people’s platforms. Twelve months on, the conclusion I have reached is duller and more useful than I expected: the fix was never a better network. It was a worse one.
Not worse in quality. Worse in ambition. Slower, smaller, less interested in showing me things I did not ask for.
What actually changed
I read most things through a feed reader again. That is the whole of it. RSS was not resurrected by anybody clever, it simply never died, and at some point in the last couple of years the effort of maintaining a list of sites I like became obviously smaller than the effort of being served an algorithmic timeline and pretending it was a choice.
The difference is not that a feed reader is better designed. It is not. The difference is that it has no opinion. It shows me everything from the people I picked, in order, once, and then it stops. There is no “you might also like”. There is no second scroll. When I have read it, I have finished, which is a sensation the modern web has spent fifteen years engineering out of existence.
The federated bit
I set this site up to federate a while back, using ActivityPub, which means the posts turn up in the fediverse as posts rather than as links to somewhere else. I wrote about doing it at the time and expected it to be a novelty.
What I did not anticipate is how much it changes the incentive. When your own site is the thing being distributed, the site is where you put the effort. The alternative arrangement, where you write a good post somewhere rented and then advertise it on your own domain, always had it backwards.
I should be honest about scale here, because there is a lot of triumphalism written about the fediverse by people who imply otherwise. The numbers are small. Almost nobody is following this site that way. I do not especially mind, but “I own my distribution” and “I have distribution” are not the same claim, and I notice a lot of posts eliding the two.
Why the domain is the point
I have been through this cycle enough times to have stopped finding it interesting. A platform arrives, everybody moves in, the platform decides what it wants to be when it grows up, and everybody discovers that their archive was a tenancy rather than a possession. I have written the small version of that post about Google Plus, about Instagram, about Twitter. It is the same post every time and the only variable is how much came out with me.
Keeping a personal domain alive is not a statement about decentralisation. It is much more boring than that. It is the only arrangement where the thing that decides whether my writing still exists in ten years is whether I paid an invoice, rather than whether a company changed strategy.
That is not sovereignty. It is just having the keys.
The honest caveat
Doing it this way is more work and fewer people see it. Both of those are true and neither is a reason not to do it, but I am not going to pretend the trade is free. If what you want is an audience quickly, the slow option is the wrong option, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
What you get instead is that nothing you write disappears because somebody else got bored. Over twenty-five years, that has turned out to be the thing I actually wanted.
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