The short form web

July 21, 2024

Time and time again I find myself wondering, what is the point to all of it? When referring to the short form web, I am talking about social media apps like Threads, Warpcast, Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky. All of them have their various pluses and minuses. To say one is better than another is difficult to say.

• If you want the mainstream Twitter replacement walled garden, choose Threads.
• If you want to interact with crypto people, choose Warpcast.
• If you want Twitter with all of the left wing liberals removed, choose Twitter.
• If you want the maximum amount of control and moderation, choose Mastodon.
• If you want an independent protocol, choose Bluesky.

Since there is so much fragmentation, it really depends on the people you are following and what platform they choose to prioritize.

As someone who was never “good at Twitter”, it’s a challenge to decide what platform to focus my time and attention. I am on all of these platforms because I am trying to fight against the SEO where most results when searching for Mark Kerrigan lead to information about Nancy Kerrigan’s brother. Searching for “mark kerrigan seattle” leads to much more relevant results. I mostly use them for reposting my blog articles.

Boris Mann discusses his multiple accounts in Mostly POSSE. Aside from the odd acronym for POSSE, (publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere), the eventual problem with using any of these social media apps is the interactions you make remain in a silo on the individual platform. Unlesss you are disciplined enough to archive everything you ever come into contact with, there will inevitably be data loss.

Take for example, a link to an album on YouTube, SPACE DEMON by Kosmovoid. It’s easy to copy and paste a link to share and not think too much about it. But if for whatever reason the video link goes down, is there enough information in your original post to figure out what you shared? Say I link to their album on Bandcamp. Surely this is a reliable way to share. Except what happens when someone deletes or removes their Bandcamp? Take for example Ricky Pharoe, a hip hop artist in Seattle. He deleted all of his albums from Bandcamp. Unless you bought the album when it was available, the information is lost. The web is not forever.

My goal when participating on these social platforms is to preserve what I share as much as possible. I now have a process to save my own copy of the text and images I post. The next step is making sure when I share a link, I share more than just the link itself and include an image, original title and description. I also want to incorporate a way to share these back on my own website. Participating on the short form web is fast, but without enough care to archive what we share for ourselves, the web will forget.