ricmac

I signed up to a trial of write.as, a fediverse blogging tool that supports the ActivityPub protocol (just like Mastodon). I'm still working out how I want to participate in the fediverse, but I like the idea of returning to my roots as a tech blogger in the early 2000s — when I started the blog Read/Write Web on Radio Userland. Back then, 2003-04, I would write relatively informal posts based on testing the latest web technologies and opining on the new “social software” theories of that time.

I've been tired of centralized social media for years now and first explored decentralized social media in 2017, when I wrote a short-lived blog called AltPlatform (this was before the word “alt” began to have sinister undertones!). I tried out Mastodon that year, as well as various micro-blogging services and plugins on WordPress, before my attention drifted elsewhere. Ok I admit, I explored blockchain in 2018, then in 2019 I started a Substack that I aimed to turn into a premium subscription product. By 2020, I was back writing about good old web dev, at The New Stack. I wrote various articles about the fediverse and decentralized tech over 2021 and this year, and of course the Elon Musk takeover has prompted me to return to exploring the fediverse.

So let's see how this goes...