The post « Blogs don’t have to be so lonely » (via Dave) has had me thinking, in between two feedings for my poor old Oscar. Manuel’s blog doesn’t have comments. Just like this one in its early days, and pretty much all blogs at the time.
We linked to each other.
Comments changed that: it became less about linking to others, more about leaving your link on other people’s blogs.
Less invitations for your neighbours to join you, more peeing on the bushes in their garden.
Comments aren’t all bad of course. It’s great to have a space for discussion that is strongly connected to the post that sparked it. But they can be subverted and it can go overboard.
When it comes all about the comments, we end up with Facebook, Twitter (RIP), Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and the like.
This is a shortcut and it’s debatable. What I’m getting at is the respective importances of « writing » versus « discussing » on various platforms/tools. Just like with martial arts (bear with me), the distance between the protagonists determines the style.
How immediate and interactional are our online spaces? And how do those characteristics make us more or less likely to default to using a given medium or platform, or drift away?
One thing that is very clear to me is that I use « the socials » on my phone a lot, but I never blog from my phone. I’m doing it now, to try to understand this better — but that really never happens. I’ll write comments on my phone, I’ll write blogpost-length entries on LinkedIn or Facebook (well, before I was disappeared) that should have been blog posts, but when I think of something to write here, I want my keyboard and the digital environment my computer provides.
Because it’s more « I have something to write » and less « oh, I have something to tell you or share with you ».
On the socials, it’s a quick passing something in my mind that I want to catch and make available to whoever is around right now. On my blog, it’s something that I feel deserves a longer shelf-life. But I think that distinction in my gut is a bit of a fallacy: otherwise I wouldn’t be so broken up about losing 18 years of « stuff » on Facebook.
What I’ve wanted for a long time is the easiness and immediacy of « social sharing » with a way to « transform » some or all of it into blog posts, or blog post material. Something parallel to what I’ve done with my voice memos (I need to blog about this) which allows me to capture snippets of passing thoughts throughout the day in a frictionless manner, and then nearly automatically merge all those tiny audio files into one, that gets transcribed and digested.
I would like Openvibe (or whatever client I happen to be using, ideally seamlessly synced between phone and desktop, like the « Facebook experience » was) to allow me to mark posts (by me or others) as « for the blog » in some way, and also « switch to blogging » if I realise mid-writing that « this should be a post (too) ».
So, how was writing this on my phone? Not that bad. Is it just a question of habit? The small size of the screen, which means I do not have a « zoomed out » view of what I’ve written, bothers me. Adding links is OK (now I’ve realised I can just « paste » the link on selected text) but it seems to sometimes shift the link one character to the right (super annoying). Writing… well, it’s writing in a phone. My thumbs complain. It’s slower. I need to correct more mistakes than when I’m typing.
So, maybe it’s not so much that Openvibe or whatever social client should accommodate my blog, but that my blogging client should allow me to follow my socials and post to them. And why not, subscribe to my RSS feeds. (Now I’m wondering if I’m going to look very silly because it already does this 😅.)
Time to continue feeding the cat!