I sometimes have difficulty explaining to friends why micro.json.blog exists. Why post there and Twitter/Facebook? Saying that I want to “own my own content on my own domain” doesn’t resonate with most people in my social circle. There’s some sense to it, but I think the main reaction is “that seems like trouble/ruckus for small gains”.

I think a better answer to why I try and keep spaces that I fully own and control on the internet is found in @manton’s post today:

Facebook and YouTube are conflicted about how to handle this because their model is wrong.

Centralized platforms have succeeded on three stools:

  1. Ease of use.
  2. Discovery
  3. Network effects

Unfortunately, creating a platform that succeeds at all three of these things also creates a platform that is an effective vector for hate speech, harassment, and coordinate misinformation campaigns. That’s not a possibility, it’s an empirical fact.

The current model has made it so that solving easy problems around speech require seemingly impossibly hard solutions. I want to take some of that back.