2024 hasn't been particularly good for community. I feel stuck in this city where I don't belong. The online counterpart of the XOXO Festival, the group chat that carried me through the worst of the pandemic, will shut down at the end of the year. Instagram, where so many of my long time, long distance friends put the majority of their time, feels so hostile to me, suffocating.

I've always kind of kept my distance from Instagram. From the beginning, I didn't understand how it fit into my life when I already had a blog, I posted photos on Flickr, I was on Tumblr. And now it's owned by Facebook.

I just don't have the energy, the literal bandwidth, for a dozen different platforms. If I'm putting effort into YouTube—owned by Google, covered in ads—how many ethical compromises must I make just to build something online?

This wasn't meant to be an existential blog post, lol. I just wanted to let you know that I'm posting on Mastodon again. You can follow me there. If you want to try out the platform (it's open source! you can choose your community!), I'm happy to answer questions and help you sign up. A lot of people have chosen Bluesky in the post-Twitter migration, and I get it. It feels a lot like Twitter. If you're there, I'm following you via RSS, and I'm gonna try to comment more.

What I really need, to complement the blog here and the videos on YouTube, is more than just a place to put the little thoughts, the one-liners, the links. A lot of that has been going to the group chat and, more recently, Tumblr tags—the most sotto voce place on the internet.

I needed a place to reach out. Blogs are great, yes. You have to own your space, sure. But blogs are broadcasting. Social media is connecting. And that's what I need right now. I need to find the people I know and remind them that I'm here. I need to reach out and add new people to my network. I need to stretch myself and say, hey, I made a thing and maybe you want to take a look?

That's what Twitter was when we began. "I made a thing. Come look." I've been working so hard (and failing, to be sure) on building my "made a thing" habit that I've forgotten how to say "come look."

That's what Mastodon is going to be for me now. I want to use it to say "come look at what I made," "go look at what they made," and also, "hey friend, I miss you."

Let's stop missing each other and say "hey."