The header image, BTW, is from “Gazoon | Mosquito Vs Elephant | Funny Animal Cartoon For Kids“, a collection of computer animated shorts meant to, I guess, keep a toddler entertained for an hour or so. As research for using this image, I watched a bit of it. Bugs Bunny ain’t got nothing to worry about.
If Tweets are for Twitter posts, and Toots for Mastodon posts, and Skeets for BlueSky posts, what are the other ones? Grams for Instagram posts, I think I’ve heard, but what about Facebook? “Letters from Grandma”?
When I leave a social media platform, like all of the previous ones, I leave everything I posted behind. That’s the bargain, really — I get to share my thoughts with others for free, and in return, they claim ownership of what I say, and can sell it, mine it or do whatever they like with it, forever. Both Twitter and Google Plus offered to give me my posts in an archive when I left, and I did take them up on it, but what of it? I merged most of my G+ stuff into this blog when I was restarting it, but it didn’t integrate well. I haven’t tried with the Twitter stuff.
It would have been better if I’d always had control of it, and only lent it to Twitter et al.
When I started the Daily Blogroll, I went looking for interesting blogs to read. I wracked my brains for tech blogs I used to follow back in the day, because I didn’t want to just focus on the Blaugust bloggers. Dave Winer, one of the ur-bloggers from back in the early days of the web, was still at it. 31 years, and counting. And he was dealing with the very same thing.
His solution, unsurprisingly, was blogging. Write a post on a site that you own, and then feed it to the social medias from there. It’s still alive on your own site. If your favorite social media goes Nazi or drops off the face of the Earth, your stuff is still safe, whole, and under your control. WordPress, with its open API, was the perfect host for this. The Jetpack plugin could disperse posts to the social media, and any sort of content creation application could feed into WordPress.
Enter Dave Winer’s “WordLand“.
WordLand is a JavaScript-based front end to a WordPress blog that aims to make blogging as easy as tooting or tweeting. It’s a box that supports all the formatting WordPress does. You type, you hit send, and you’re done.
It’s been amazing. I find myself posting more, simply because the interface is weirdly better than that on either Mastodon or BlueSky. There’s no length restrictions, as Jetpack just cuts off after so many characters and links to the rest on the host blog.
As for the host blog — I thought for maybe a second about just using Chasing Dings, this blog, but, first, it doesn’t look like WordLand likes WordPress blogs that aren’t hosted by WordPress. I didn’t want those sour grapes, anyway. Secondly, do I really want this blog, that I use for longer posts, cluttered with my random daily thoughts?
Enter West Karana.
Some may remember when I ran a blog called West Karana, named such after one of my favorite vanilla EverQuest zones. The original domain is lost and used for scams, unfortunately. I’d hesitated to revive the name, largely because people might find themselves at the scam site by accident, but here, it made sense. People would read the stuff I wrote on social media, and if they were interested in reading the full item, they’d just follow the link, which could be any old name, as they wouldn’t be typing it in. Why not West Karana?
I made two West Karanas, actually — westkarana.xyz points to my Daily Blogroll, and westkarana.blog points to my WordLand-sourced chronicle of my social media posts.
I own all my content, now. It may not be worth anything, but it’s mine. I can back up all the stuff in the new blog onto my local drive anytime I want. I can even upload it into Chasing Dings, if I want, all categorized so that I could keep it off the front if I felt I needed to. There’s an RSS feed so that if someone wanted to, for any reason, see my social media posts in a feed reader, that could happen. I can even stop AI crawlers from being trained on my stuff (though they probably could just get it from the social media sites directly).
It’s nice to be in control.
Not a huge fan of Jetpack, though. I’ll probably be looking for alternatives.
I love this!! However I don’t think I’ve seen any of those posts on Bluesky…. ?
Yeah, I just added BlueSky today. I’d tested it before, but wasn’t in love with how they were formatted. But from now on, my bon mots will be skeeted.
Hmmm… just tried a new one and Jetpack said it could not be shared to BlueSky. Weird.
It was, though. The Switch 2 one, right? I saw it!
I did that one by hand. The next one was automatic, though.
I read all of that with interest but I really didn’t understand much of it, never having used any social media sites since I decided they were too addictive back in the days of Yahoo Groups or whatever it was called. I’d be very happy to see the return of West Karana, though, in whatever form.
I recently revisited a lot of the offline stuff I put out in zines and I think the creative and analytical pieces – fiction, proper reviews, essays, that sort of thing – still have value today but all the endless reacting to things other people wrote or just chatting about things we did back in the 90s seems completely pointless to revisit. That was the analog equivalent of Twitter et all, I guess.
There is a definite curiosity value to it all. I’d be very interested to read some of the huge screeds I used to post on forums like EQ’s “The Newbie Zone” back in the day. I can’t say I think it’s much of a loss to me or anyone else that it’s gone forever, though. Some things are meant to be ephemeral. In fact, I think a lot more things probably should be than are, nowadays.
I find most of the things I’ve written about, I’ve entirely forgotten. This brings them back. Even my first post here, about rage-quitting a raid for reasons, is a little embarrassing — but I remember what was happening in my life back then, and it’s worth reading and remembering.
I don’t know if anyone else would get anything at all out of this, but I appreciate some glimpses into the past.