What Am I Doing Here?

Blogs are still a thing?

Yeah, that’s a fair question. Individually created media on the internet has shifted heavily away from personal blogs over the last two decades with the rise of YouTube, podcasts, Twitch streams and all the other ways individuals can become “creators”. I never had a blog during the “heyday” of blogging. But I’ve really enjoyed “microblogging” as a form of social media. I spent years on Twitter and enjoyed the ability to share my interests with people without concern for things like “getting people to my site” or “writing enough to justify a whole blog post”, as well as the conversations that came out of those posts.

Pouring one out for Twitter

As time has gone on, I’ve found myself spending less and less time on Twitter. Not because my friends have left, most of them are still there. No, mostly to avoid doomscrolling. Twitter has so much garbage on it, and I have very little control over how much of that garbage ends up in my “feed” compared to some of the other apps now out there. So I’ve mostly opted out of using it.

I’ve been on Mastodon since 2019 when someone I followed on Twitter was talking about infosec.exchange. While I did not feel particularly strongly at the time about the federated aspects of Mastodon, I did really like the idea of separating my work related usage of social media (Infosec), from my personal usage of social media (friends, live music, community). So I hopped on, created an account, saw there wasn’t much activity and promptly forgot about it until early November 2022. In fact, my very first “Toot”, as they’re called on Mastodon, was about my signup experience on the site in November 2022, or how I discovered I had already created an account years prior and forgotten about it.

Large parts of the Infosec “Community” have shifted to the use of Mastodon, while other portions of my social circles have stayed put. Before the Death of the Twitter API, I had used a site called FeedSeer to visualize my social graph on Twitter in an attempt to create lists for distinct groups and better my experience trying to use the app with a single account across multiple social circles.

This is what my graph looked like at one point. The green represents folks that I follow that work in tech/infosec/cybersecurity/software. The pink represents folks I follow that like the band Phish, and blue represents a handful of accounts that didn’t necessarily fit in either (NPR, CNN, President Obama) from what I recall. The green and pink might be reversed. They’re largely separate groups, but those two very specific groups made it difficult to talk about “Phish” on my timeline without additional mental resources dedicated to determining context. Talking about going to see Phish the band might not always include enough context-specific words to tip off folks that only know me as “someone that works in infosec”, and we’d end up in the weirdest threads where one of us is talking about a band and one is talking about email.

But Mastodon is dead/dying/a graveyard

That’s not my experience. And its likely not the experience for many people. One of the fundamental differences between Mastodon and Twitter, for those that don’t know, is that Mastodon is a collection of separate but federated servers run by individuals. You can follow anyone on any server, but depending on what client you’re using, your “timeline” options might be limited to “People I Follow” and “People On This Server”, which can make discovering individual accounts across servers very difficult if people don’t “Boost” (the Mastodon equivalent of a retweet) posts often enough. As much as Mastodon diehard fans will say its not the case, this is why Mastodon server selection is actually really important. For the vast majority of people who don’t want to know how the entire social media platform works underneath the hood, the server selection that happens at account creation will have a huge impact on their experience. Especially when each instance of Mastodon has their own rules and norms about content that does or does not need a Content Warning, boosting, and the instance administrator has the ultimate ability at the end of the day to determine which other instances federation happens with.

What else is out there?

I’ve also been on Bluesky for the last few weeks. I love the way the app feels, and I love the community that is growing there. But it is still in a private beta, and until the people I already interact with elsewhere are able to be there too, its still too early to tell. Bluesky is built on top of the The AT Protocol which offers federation like Mastodon and its use of ActivityPub. For now, Bluesky appears to be the only app built on the protocol, and the protocol itself is still being defined and built as far as I can see, so its early. Its really early. Its possible part of the buzz I get from the app is due to that. While the UI for the iOS app is sleek and modern, it still reminds me a lot of some smaller early 2000s vBulletin forums or 2008-ish Twitter as far as “getting in at the ground floor”. Its like showing up to a house party early. You know you’ll have a great night, and right now you’re mostly riding on the anticipation of everyone getting there.

Wasn’t the first question about why you’re writing a blog though?

Yes. I’ve rambled. That’s exactly why this is a blog and not a Twitter thread, or a series of Toots, or a collection of storms on Bluesky (who I do not believe has decided on what their “posts” will be called). It is just really nice to have a place where I can write long form thoughts out onto a page. I don’t have to press send every 240 characters, wait for the previous thought to send, open that thought to make sure I keep the thread going, and hope someone doesn’t come along and shit on my parade based on an isolated Tweet that was halfway through a thread. I don’t think I have the energy or patience to “pivot to video” and become a Youtube creator, or stream on Twitch. Maybe some day, but for now, I’m happy to just throw these words out into the abyss of the internet.