going semi-viral on Bluesky just made me miss blogging

Since early 2019(!), I’ve been slowly but surely orienting my online presence around my Hugo blog. This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on social media platforms, but that those are merely appendages to a website that I have more control over. In fact, I’m really pleased with the POSSE—Post to Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere—setup that I’ve developed over the past couple of years. It currently works like this: All of my posts start on this website, and then I use the EchoFeed service to send posts to my Mastodon accounts and a Bluesky account (Micro.blog also imports my posts via RSS).

This feels like a pretty good compromise. I’m of the strong opinion that everyone ought to write on blogs and read through RSS readers, but I’m pragmatic enough to understand that most people just don’t do that. The most recent uptick in Bluesky interest has brought a lot of people I want to follow to that platform, and I’m really glad that: 1) I use an RSS reader (Reeder for macOS/iOS) that lets me subscribe to social accounts alongside RSS and 2) that a POSSE approach lets me share my writing with folks on those platforms who aren’t going to use RSS, even if I think they should.

Earlier this week, I had an experience of going semi-viral (or at least getting a lot of engagement) with one of my blog posts that got forwarded to Bluesky:

Every fake ad in this month’s print issue of The Onion is making fun of Elon Musk. All of them. What a great news source.

As you may see in the screenshot above (which I took just before finally taking down the post from Bluesky), this post got 42 reposts, 3 replies and 3 quotes (I may have gotten more of those if I hadn’t disabled both a couple of hours into this post getting some traction), and 944 likes. It’s probably overstating things to describe this as even semi-viral, but I’ve certainly never posted anything on Bluesky that got this much attention, and as far as I can remember, this outperformed most/all of my best posts on Twitter despite spending a decade on the platform and having a stronger network there. It’s the first brush with virality I’ve had in a while and perhaps the “best-performing” post I’ve ever written. As far as I can tell, this all resulted from The Onion’s CEO, Ben Collins, finding it thanks to keywords and reposting it from his influential account, which had a domino effect in terms of reposts and likes.

I was pretty surprised at the discomfort that I felt by this. I would have expected to get some dopamine hits and personal thrills from the experience, but instead I found myself thinking a lot about the superficiality of modern social platforms. This isn’t usually an argument that I make, and I don’t even know what specific argument I’m trying to make here, but nearly a thousand people (none of which, as far as I can tell, I had even a loose connection with) mashing like on my post was more of an unsettling experience than it was the digital gratification than I would have expected. It got me thinking about how easy social platforms make it to write, respond, like, and share—and, perhaps for the first time, wondering if it’s too easy.

This especially came through in some of the replies and quote posts I got, which were pretty superficial critiques of Musk. I (obviously) think that Musk deserves to be critiqued—that was the point of my post, and you can go through my website to see how consistently critical of him I’ve been in recent years. It’s not even like my post was some deeply thought-out statement rather than taking personal pleasure in how many potshots The Onion was taking against a public figure that I’m not very fond of. Still, what I was seeing with replies and quote posts felt like it was devolving into a game of “here are the usual jokes that we trot out against Musk every time” rather than anything loosely substantive or personal.

I’m not going to stop writing off-the-cuff short posts like this one—I’ve put a lot of work into making my blog support microblogging, and it’s a genre that I appreciate. I’m also not going to stop syndicating these posts to platforms where they could continue to get lots of engagement like what I got earlier this week. I do find, though, that I think I prefer a social ecosystem that creates a bit more friction in finding, sharing, and responding to content. All those likes and reposts felt kind of hollow to me in a way that a blog post that linked back to my comment wouldn’t have.

I like the social web, but I’d really like it to look more like blogging.

• The Onion
• social media
• blogging
• POSSE
• EchoFeed
• Mastodon
• Bluesky
• Micro.blog
• Reeder
• Elon Musk