I joined Twitter when it still felt like a small town. My user number was somewhere in the first ten thousand, which says a lot about both how early it was and how much promise it seemed to hold. Back then it was fun. I met new people, travelled, made friends, and watched a global conversation start to take shape. It was optimistic.

That version of the internet has more or less gone. Twitter is now a mess, and social media has splintered into a half dozen smaller islands. There is BlueSky with its early-Twitter energy, Mastodon with its principled decentralisation, Threads with its Meta polish, and of course LinkedIn and Instagram each doing their own thing. I don’t really live in any of them, but I have people I care about scattered across all of them. Which makes it hard to know where to show up.

In my POSSE post I wrote about publishing on your own site and syndicating everywhere else. I still believe in that. The open web remains the one bit of online life that doesn’t disappear when an algorithm changes. But there’s friction in maintaining it. Writing a proper blog post takes time. It needs some formatting, probably an image, and a bit of polish if it’s going to get noticed at all. I miss being able to share something small in the moment without overthinking it.

Micro.blog feels like a small answer to that. It has some of the looseness that early Twitter had. You can post a thought or a photo without turning it into an event. It federates out to other platforms if you want, and it still belongs to you, and importantly it brings back responses so that I have a roughly centralised view of the social world. It’s a bit scrappy, but I like that. It reminds me of when the internet felt like a neighbourhood rather than a shopping mall.

So for now I’m experimenting. You can find short posts and photos at micro.mattwhite.me while I see whether this feels like home again.

What about you? How do you use social media these days, and where does it still feel worth the effort?