Looking at the feed here it's a bit of a shambles, innit? Most of my long-form energy has been spent at work, and residual creative output, which is (happily) reduced since family-time comes first, has been mostly done on my phone in off hours.

But now Twitter threads are broken. I used to scratch my writing itch that way, but ever since the functionality regressed such that threading tweets basically spams everyone's feed I feel like I need to stop doing those.

Might this actually be the thing that gets me back to blogging? Stranger things have happened.

The idea of writing under your own masthead is hardly new. POSSE: Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. That's the Open Web Way. But it's way too complex for most people to do, as evidenced by the fact that I — a trained professional with a personal stake in the fortunes of said Open Web — haven't been doing it myself.

There's an element of hypocrisy here, sure, but also logistical practicality. Social media provides a really comfortable form-factor for posting from your phone, which is where I have time/opportunity to do it these days. Plus the instant feedback dopamine hack is real. That's why it's eclipsed broadcast media as the mass medium of our era.

Things are changing though, devolving. Now that we're almost all entirely online and well past the point where there's a centrally dominant network, there could be a swing back to the open as sites inevitably rise and fall. Lots of trend-lines pointing in that direction, which is (mostly) a professional concern for me since I'm in the business of helping organizations get results out of their owned web presence, but maybe there's something personal in it too.

If I had the time to write software for myself again I'd love to play around hacking on a neat little mobile web UI for posting. Hook that up with a little server-side mechanism to syndicate it out to social media networks, and then monitor for engagement, feeding that back to my phone... you can do all that easily with the web. Maybe someone's already done it? Probably, but I've hit my timebox for this post and need to get back to work.

Still, first post in almost three years. Back on my bullshit? Time will tell.