As far as social media is concerned, everything except Reddit (the only platform I still love – old.reddit.com forever!) makes me too neurotic and weird; it’s like a bad drug I don’t like or need (same with smart phones – good riddance, well over a decade now without one). I spent a lot of time writing on Medium over the past decade, but I’m winding that involvement down, as I renew my love affair with old-school blogging.

I’ve very happily switched over to RSS again as my all purpose personal homepage, with sources pulled from all over, and no platform in control of what I see.

As far as stats (and comments) goes, I’m big into privacy & data protection and always hate (and actively block) those pop-ups that warn you about “essential cookies.” I’m a firm believer that there’s no such thing as an essential cookie required to read a piece of text.

So I just decided, screw it, I won’t bother trying to track visitors. Yeah, it would be nice to know what people searched who landed here, but I don’t want to get mixed up in holding their data, or having a privacy policy, or notifying you about cookies, blah blah blah. Not having stats (or comments) is weird at first, but also freeing, because now I write to write, to express something, to get somewhere – and I just don’t even have to tempt myself with the constant need to “check my stats” or likes, or whatever is the thing we’re supposed to use now to measure our online virtue.

Instead of logging into platforms to leave comments on other peoples’ stuff, I’m instead just replying to people via my blog, which is more fun, slow motion & considered for me, and is helping me to dislodge from the social media mindfuck. If anyone sees it or not is beside the point now. I’m doing it to do it, and having run an old school successful blog back in the days before any of that stuff existed, I know it’s still a viable path forward, and one I’m loving returning to.

I’ve looked a little at some of the features Mastodon uses like ActivityPub and Webmentions, to see if I could integrate them into my WordPress install, but I never pulled the trigger on that. Perhaps there’s an easy way now, but the weird old school blogger part of me is almost ready to return to trackbacks – does anybody still even use those??

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