The whole point of me setting up this “notes” section is so I can write stream-of-consciousness short notes and publish them freely and frequently. But I cannot seem to overcome my fear of overwhelming people’s rss feeds or something.
I post my art and street photography regularly on mastodon (and instagram). I thread them, because I want them to exist in a collection instead of standalone orphans. Yesterday I was looking for my art thread on Ivory, and it was completely gone. Thankfully it still exists on the actual server’s website. I guess it must something about the fetching of data from the API. I love mastodon, but we often experience replies going permanently missing after a couple of days, etc.
This scare of my thread suddenly going missing made me think deeply of the longevity of my data on these platforms. I should have learnt my lesson from twitter I guess. The only way to circumvent this is simply to host a copy of everything I post on social media on my own website. Then, I can manipulate it however I want. Since twitter has gone down the train I can no longer see “on this day” tweets from the past. My mastodon posts seem to be going into a similar blackhole. I have already built an “on this day” function on this website, so if I host all my data here I will have plenty of time capsules for myself. I’ll also be able to use a common taxonomy on them, display them in interesting ways, etc.
I don’t really know why I overthink these things. I guess people can simply unsubscribe from the main feed and subscribe only to the long-form blog posts if they want?
This is a really longwinded to say I think I am going to start posting more micro-blog-like content here. Hopefully I can come out of this self-imposed rut.