It’s distressing what’s happening to my home country. I’m distressed.

More insanity from the MAHA Death Cult.

Pratik asks, “Mastodon as a Blog?” and thinks mostly “yes”, but I think that requires describing a blog as social media. Mastodon is social media, which of course, is deeply inspired by blogging. But it’s also all the things social media is, for better or worse. I’m a participant in social media and I like it. But social media applications are not blogs.

The question is of course, “What is a blog?” Or perhaps more importantly, “Why do I want to post?”– because who cares what a “blog” is instead of why you’re posting/writing on the internet. The reason why social media defeated “blogs” and the two are compared so often is they have two shared core features– they bundle identity and publishing user generated content.

Lots of things do that now, but blogs were really about how to have an identity you can point someone to online where you posted your content with some kind of chronology/timeliness element. Should we call all derivatives blogs? YouTube lets me post a link that someone go to and find user generated content with dates. That’s why it was called “vlogging”.

I guess that’s why I don’t care too much what’s a blog. Instead, I just think people should choose to post in a place that serves their needs.

It’s quite clear that the social media model is perfect for a lot of people. Far more people post content to Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, BlueSky, Reddit, Tumblr, Substack, and any number of other social media application. It’s the user experience that best meets most people’s desires for posting and establishing an identity (or several) online. That’s totally fine.

I really don’t think the fact that you can run your own Mastodon server makes it not a social media application. That may change who is willing to use it and whose needs it meets, just like it may turn some people away. But its features, structure, and setup is that of social media. Social media largely encourages something that looks like a deeply overlapping diagram with blogs– because social media’s birth was making blogging, commenting, and sharing easier. Using and liking social media is not a moral or ethical failing. It just might meet your needs, just like it meets most people’s needs.

Personally, I like both things– I like having my own site, and I like participating on social media. I like social media so much, that an important feature of my own blog is making it easy to participate in many social networks.

It’s ok to like what you like for what it is. No need to make it something it’s not.

So we’ve got a great mRNA flu vaccine, and I may have to travel outside the US to get it.