I have been complaining about social media for at least 7 years, maybe more. I don’t like the way it captures my attention, the way it sucks me in, the way it kills my mood and makes me distrustful of people.

Yesterday I saw a positive post about a thing currently in the zeitgeist, and whose viewpoint I agreed with. My response was not to share it or comment on it, but instead I went to the comments because I wanted to see what the horrible people would say about it. I was looking to be outraged, to find people to whom I felt myself to be morally superior.

I do not like this version of myself. I don’t like me on social media.

I like Facebook (for example) best as a place to put thoughts like the 3 paragraphs above. It’s important to me that people read these thoughts - I get no value from putting them in a private journal. I have been blogging since 2003 - I am used to writing in public. I like the accountability that comes from being a public person.

But I do not like the spambots and the trolls, the debt I feel when I get lots of comments, or god almighty, the notifications. And it pisses me off that people who I find deplorable and whose worldview I do not share use my words to make money.

Fine, people say. You have a blog - use it.

Fair, fair. But while I have been using WordPress for almost 16 years now, the last 6 or so of those has been a struggle. It does so much now, to try to be so much to so many people, that it does nothing particularly well, and it brings with it so much friction and is so busy that it overwhelms my ADHD brain. Writing a blog post used to be quick and easy. Now it’s such a production.

And somewhere along the way, we began to write for algorithms, instead of writing for readers. So many words per paragraph, images, keywords, tags, and categories. Along the way, we abandoned things like point of view and voice.

So, I’m trying a new thing - a new, from scratch, blog. I’m not going to import my back catalog - although it will remain on the internet at blog.hughhollowell.org. I’m using micro.blog as the platform to make things easy and clean, albeit a bit expensive for what you get.

When I’m done in a week or so setting it up, it will import automatically to Mastodon and Threads and BlueSky for folks who want to follow that way, and there will be an RSS feed. I will be hosting it at my oldest URL I currently own, hughlh.com.

It’s an experiment. Let’s give it a month or so and see if I still like it. But so far, I like it a lot.