Thoughts about writing an online Journal
It doesn't really matter if you call it “writing a blog”, “posting to a social network”, “publishing a diary”, or whatever else you might want to call itthey are all the same thing. The only real differences between any of the “platforms” are the freedoms afforded you.
Most of the popular social platformssuch as Facebook , Twitter, Tumblr, Ello, Slack, and so onare really “walled gardens”. They don't play nicely with othersor if they do, they only do it early in their life to encourage switchingthen they build their walls a little higher.
I can't help feeling that the entire “social” thing on the internetparticularly for bloggingis going to fall in on itself. There is a growing dissatisfaction with platforms significantly changing core featuresparticularly features used to discover and connect with each other.
Many of the problems are caused by capitalism. The well-known social platforms have all used their users as products indirectly to advertisers. Design changes within established platforms are nearly always due to strategic plans to garner more income from each head of population within the system. Too many platforms have followed the same pathlots of users, massive venture capital, go public, then slash and burn features to force more revenue from the same population of users. Twitter did it, Facebook did it, and now Tumblr is doing it.
I'm not entirely blamelessI use TumblrI also host my blog at WordPressbecause it's free. If I really wanted to make a stand, I would host my own blog somewhere like Digital ocean, and ensure it could be consumed by open, standard protocols such as RSS. Like so many others, I can't be bothered.
In many ways the price we pay for the easy discovery of community within walled gardens on the internet is the lack of control we have over the features and functionality available within those gardens. You get what you pay for