Re: Having a Microblog on a Traditional Blog

2023-10-11

329 words, ~3min reading time

Note: This was initially published on Scribbles, my previous "micro blog". I discontinued it and moved the contents into this blog on 2023-12-05.

I read Kev Quirk's newest blog post "Having a Microblog on a Traditional Blog" earlier today, and since I (more or less) "microblog" here, I have a few thoughts I'd like to share.

Contrary to Kev, I prefer this platform separated from my Mastodon account on Fosstodon for some freedoms.

Fosstodon is not a generalistic instance; it is a tech-related one. And although it seems as if non-tec-related content is handled in a quite relaxed way I don't want to exploit this friendliness.

Nowadays, I'm less interested in the newest software or technology, but I'm more focused on my creative projects. Sometimes software plays a role in this (and in those rare cases, I post to Fosstodon every once in a while). However, more often than not, I think about other things. Of course, I could move to another instance. Though, I'm extremely satisfied with the maintenance and administration of the Fosstodon team, and I don't want to search for something similar elsewhere. Yeah, I'm getting old :)

But this is not the only reason. This (micro)blog gives me a few options:

• I can write about whatever I want
• I can write longer articles than the regular limit on Mastodon (and I loathe long posts or threads on Mastodon or any other social network for that matter)
• I can use the full Markdown formatting features that WriteFreely has to offer (e.g. code blocks).

Perhaps some articles I publish here would fit better on my main blog, but over there, I strive for a high level of quality, which requires more time than I'm currently willing to invest.

Nevertheless, this does not mean that I never thought about moving a post from here over to my blog. As a matter of fact, I'm considering it for some articles.

So far, these are my reasons and thoughts about this topic. And I realised over the last few days that I published more (written) content here than anywhere else in years (combined!).

I think there are two main reasons:

1. I don't care about quality as much as on my blog; I just write down what currently floats in my head.
2. I can write from anywhere: from a laptop to a smartphone. At the moment, I'm writing this on my tablet using an external Bluetooth keyboard. But I also wrote a shorter post on my smartphone while cooking!

Therefore, I will keep posting here and boost the posts that are more or less tech-related on my Mastodon account.