Re: Places on the web
Manu Moreale, writing on his blog about how the digital world often reflects the physical one:
There was a time when forums were the cities of the web but now are more like small towns. They’re the place where people congregate around shared interests. Spend enough time on one and you’ll get to know its citizens. New threads are infrequent, discussions are slow and can develop over months and years and it’s the refuge for those who are tired of the busyness of the big cities but still want some sense of belonging to a community.
And then there’re personal sites, the house in the forest. It’s the place people escape to when they’re tired of the noise. However personal sites are not isolated islands. They interact and stay connected, using links, mentions, emails, and RSS. It’s a part of the web that moves at a slower pace and that’s a feature, not a bug.
I really like this metaphor for your blog being your home in a connected neighborhood, and how the internet is a compelling digital manifestation of the community structures that humans have built in the physical world — but with improbable scales. Manu likens the large social networks like Facebook and X and TikTok to major cities, while I think of them as skyscrapers. Silos, if you will, reaching impossibly far into the sky. So many people crammed into one spot, sharing common utilities, and yet only a small percentage actually know each other or interact directly.
Mastodon might be more akin to mass transportation system. There are large instances and small ones — like planes, trains, or buses — but they all interact and intersect. It doesn’t really matter which one you use because the point isn’t which you’re on, the point is where you go and what you do with it. Sometimes you’ll chat with the people you’re sharing the bus with (the local timeline), but it’s kind of rare.
Blogs, as Manu noted, are the homes. We decorate them differently. We organize what’s inside them in different ways. You might like yours tidy, while mine is a bit of a mess. We stockpile posts and links, hobbies and projects, and then sometimes get a wild hair and clean house. Throw out the junk. Put a fresh coat of paint up and new photos on the wall. But despite how different each individual home is from one another, they all serve the same purpose. It’s where we live and can just be ourselves.
(Email is — of course — just like snail mail, spam and all.)
We can’t help but rebuild familiarity with our physical world into our digital ones.
This is post #21/31 for Blaugust 2024.