There was the time when I was excited to join a new social media platform called Twitter. I found interesting people talking about interesting things. It was a hierarchical timeline, where I could go back to and find what stood out to me at other times.
There was also Instagram, which was all about photos. I remember following travellers, who shared a lot of photos of personal moments, which felt like I was travelling along with them. Every picture felt personal and there was no text, other than perhaps a location or thought that connected with the image. Just like on early Twitter, I could just go back to find an image if I remembered it for whatever reason.
This feels now like a distanced memory, with X (Twitter) being a place of polarisation and Instagram being a stream of influencers and fast paced content that causes me headache.
Visiting X (Twitter) or Instagram today, feels exhausting. While I still open X from time to time in the attempt to read things shared from a handful of people that I'm interested in, I'm not sure if it's at all worth my mental energy.
These days, I do enjoy reading personal blogs more and more, which keep me genuinely interested and engaged, and link to more and more interested posts from other personal blogs which is endlessly fascinating and does feel natural, compared to what all these VC funded social media feeds try to force on us.
I love reading Manuel Moreale's blog, which has led me to follow lots of other interesting people over time. Personal blogs in general have a very different purpose compared to the overproduced, loud and flashy content and algorithmic feeds. They (mostly) have no trackers, no ads and don't collect or retain data as their intention is to share personal experiences mostly for themselves, but also to genuinely help others. I like how Giles Turnbull phrases this: “A blog is your brain, over time, on the internet.”
There is also a never ending creativity attached to personal blogs & sites, which in itself is refreshing compared to social feeds — some examples are https://wwinks.com, https://lamaquinadeturing.su, https://localghost.dev, https://www.nicchan.me and many more which you can discover through Manu's People and Blogs series.
Another huge benefit of personal blogs (at least for me) is that they all embrace RSS, which means that I get new posts into my NetNewsWire (the best RSS reader for Mac, iPhone, and iPad), which is a single place for me to read.
Twitter used to support RSS, but that was killed in the process of transitioning to X. Bluesky does now support RSS, and is also bridging more or less nicely to Mastodon (Ivory) via Sky Bridge, but that's a topic for another day...