Say vs. Share

I’ve maintained a “daily notes” blog in one form or another for years. The current iteration is at baty.blog and is managed using Tinderbox. It’s like an online journal. It’s a pleasure to write in, and for me, a pleasure to read.

But sometimes I wonder whether I need a second blog for short, “micro” posts. I could instead put them here at baty.net, but I’ve never been able to wrangle WordPress into doing that properly. Or perhaps they could go on the wonderful micro.blog, Tumblr, or even Mastodon.

A few days ago I decided to try using a self-hosted Mastodon (actually GoToSocial) instance for short, frequent daily posts. That’s what it’s for, right? I installed GoToSocial on one of my servers and began posting. I immediately didn’t like it. The feed on my one-person instance is mostly empty but feels like it shouldn’t be. It’s hard to explain, but it felt wrong somehow. It felt like a social network comprised of one individual. Also, it looks horrible.

What about my usual Mastodon account at fosstodon.org? Why not post there? The timeline is busy and I don’t even have to bother maintaining anything. Fosstodon doesn’t work because it’s not mine. I want the sort of stuff I’m writing on my daily blog to be entirely under my control.

All of this reminded me that there’s a difference between the things I want to say and the things I want to share. There’s a lot of overlap, but the distinction is important. There are things I want to say out loud, but not necessarily to a room full of people. I don’t mind if someone reads them, but I don’t want to force them into anyone’s social feeds. If someone wants to read them via RSS, of course, that’s cool. I prefer that most of what I post be read via pull rather than push, if you know what I mean.

So I guess for now I’ll continue to post the things I want to say, to baty.blog. The things I want to share will go to Mastodon. Some will go both places. I hope that’s OK.