2025: Portable Ideas, Back-to-Basics Social Media, Follow Everywhere2025-01-08

The language we use to talk about the internet in 2025 is pretty grim: surveillance capitalism, enshittification, algorithmic overreach, platform fatigue, digital dark age, attention harvesting, echo chambers, troll farms, deepfakes, AI slop, clickbait, and doomscrolling are all terms which gained a foothold in popular vocabularies because they describe salient problems associated with being online. Fundamentally, we want to use the internet to share ideas, learn new things, connect with family, joke around with friends, and meet new people, but it seems like the infrastructure we rely on to do so is getting worse. There's an awful lot of discourse about how we got here and several good ideas about how to fix it (many variably sized platforms + loyal clients + interoperability; enforcing antitrust laws; transmission without algorithmic filtering + the right of exit; cooperative ownership; building public service digital media; and decentralization/federation to name a few), but I find myself thinking a lot about my relationship with the internet as it exists today, which is almost more difficult in its concreteness.

My 2024 New Years resolution was to social media again. Twitter's devolution into X meant the site I'd used to build my networks was no longer a place I wanted to spend time, and I was struggling to simultaneously find an alternative and take steps to ensure I wouldn't be in that position again. It took some time, but here's where I landed as a plan for 2025:

1. Portable Ideas

If something is worth taking more than 10 minutes to write, and/or is worth hanging onto long-term, I want it somewhere I have control, where nobody will place ads next to it, where it won't be processed by overworked content moderators, and where it would take less than an hour to move it all elsewhere should something change at the company I rely on to host it. For me, the answer is a personal website, and not a website with a complex CMS, with copyrighted templates, or in a system that makes it hard to exit. I want everything in a single, easily copy/pasted directory.

2. Back-to-Basics Social Media

The general-purpose social media sites (as opposed to small, community/interest-specific projects) excel at getting a large number of the people you want to reach in one place and facilitating one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many communications. They're not so great when they put too many features between you and your people, or when they try to swallow up the rest of the internet, aspiring to be a one-stop-shop for its users. In 2025, my social media is for light communications, not in the sense of subject matter or tone, but in terms of effort and persistence. If there's an idea worth thinking deeply about, it's worth hosting elsewhere and using social media for dissemination, not publication; if there's an exchange or a thread that's worth hanging on to, it's worth exporting in some fashion. If I'm using social media for things of long-term importance, I'm doing it wrong.

As much as possible, I will use middleware that allows me to filter/organize my feeds without the use of opaque, profit-centered ordering systems. For example, Gobo brings three of my social media feeds together in one place, with some basic customizable filters (and more down the road). We could use more tools like that.

3. Follow Everywhere

The slow, confusing death of Twitter was a hard lesson for many of us who relied on the site as our primary social network. For years, when I wanted to connect with someone online, Twitter is what I used, and when I wanted to exit I found myself paralyzed by network effects (when all of your people are in one place, it's hard to pack up and leave). While it's likely there will be a platform I use most, when I follow someone, I want to follow them everywhere. If I follow you on Bluesky, tell me your Mastodon account; if I follow you on Instagram, tell me your LinkedIn; if I follow you on Threads, tell me your [something I haven't heard of yet]! The goal is to remove social barriers to closing up shop if the situation calls for it. If network effects are like a social gravity well, it's easier to escape the pull of one giant rock if there's another big one nearby.

There's something to be said for "post everywhere," too, and middleware can help do that, too. It's worth exploring, but so far the only tools that can post everywhere I'd want to post are commercial services (and there's always the challenge of how to @-mention people/entities who use different names on different sites... open social media authority control, anyone?).

New Site, Who Dis?

First step: set up a website. It's been almost ten years since my old webhost vanished, and fifteen years since a deluge of spam and SQL injections sapped my motivation to keep the sites up-to-date.

Well, it's back, resurrected with the help of the Internet Archive. I modified it to be a static site, with fewer CSS boxes and new fonts. Tags and comments are gone -- beyond fear of another spam mess, social media conversations are the new comment sections. Otherwise it's the same design I set up in 2007. Back then, I was quite proud of myself for setting up a blog from scratch, with no php/sql/js experience and only basic knowledge of html/css. It felt good, and blogging was cool. These days, well, the design sure feels like 2007 but it's not bad enough to justify the time it would take to start over completely.

On that note, I recently discovered the website I set up in 1995, when I was 14, is on the Wayback Machine. I think I learned about the web in 1994 through a local BBS that offered shell accounts to its users (shout out to Daver at The Ministry of Knowledge). I wrote a few words on a page, saved it, and had a url I could share (but didn't know any web users). I used Lynx, a text-only browser, to access websites from a list, sometimes just guessing at domain names. Then, after graphical browsers and Geocities came along, I set up a page called (brace yourself for some intense Geocities) PaRTiCLe MaN'S WeB BoMB!@# There was another (not archived) shortly thereafter with more of a focus on art (similar enthusiasm/vibe), but that was it until 2007, and now we're here.

I suspect personal websites will have a little bit of a comeback in the near future. I mentioned above that some people are thinking about small, community-focused sites as one way to reorient the internet to better serve the public interest. Personal websites fit neatly into such a view. One of the articles I read while trying to come up with a personal internet strategy was Gita Jackson's For the Love of God, Make Your Own Website, which makes a pretty good argument (or at least an effective appeal to nostalgia) for personal websites making the internet less bad (and bonus points for a Superbad reference).

At least for now, I've got some vim and a plan. We'll see where things stand come the next set of New Years resolutions.