Aaron Ross Powell

So this is new. I have a blog again, a place for me to write about topics that aren’t a neat fit for ReImagining Liberty, which is primarily about political philosophy and ethics. But the content of this new blog isn’t the point of this post. Rather, I want to talk about the nifty tech behind this blog, why I think technology like it is (or ought to be) the future of the social internet, and why you should set up something like this too.

Social media’s in an odd place at the moment. Two of the big three platforms (Facebook and Instagram) are still going gangbusters, but the third (Twitter) is shrinking, or doesn’t exist, or isn’t a place anyone should want to hang out, depending on your perspective. And Twitter was where a lot of us hung out, and where a lot of us built what felt like our primary social presence. So much for that.

What the collapse of Twitter into X–and then X further and further into the proverbial Nazi bar–made clear is that handing ownership of your Internet social presence over to a single organization not under your control will inevitably lead sooner or later to losing the posts and connections that made your identity, and the need to rebuild elsewhere. Twitter owned all of your tweets, all of your followers, all of your follows. And all of it lived not at a domain name you controlled, but at a domain you didn’t.

I deleted my Twitter account in May of 2023 and moved my social presence to a shifting combination of Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. And anything longer than 500 characters or 300 characters I publish at ReImagining Liberty.

But that’s not ideal. It’s a pain to cross-post to a bunch of social networks and to pay attention to replies from all of them in multiple places. And ReImagining Liberty really is narrowly focused, narrower than the range of topics I want to write longer posts about.

There used to be a better way. In the days before social media, those of us who wrote about the kind of stuff I do had blogs. We’d write blog posts, typically longer than 500 or 300 characters but typically shorter than the 1000 words or more common to contemporary email newsletters, we’d follow our friends' blogs, we’d leave comments and trackbacks/pingbacks, and we’d keep track of all of it in the lost and lamented Google Reader (or some other RSS feed reading tool).

Then social media came along, and with it the dopamine hit of posting fast and counting likes, and we ditched blogs and gave ownership of our social presence to platforms. Which are undeniably neat, at least in some ways, but carry the risk of shutting down, losing steam, or going Nazi bar.

Decentralized social media, like Bluesky and Mastodon (and, soon, Threads) improves this situation. But your presence still lives with someone else. You can migrate, yes, so if you don’t like Threads anymore you can take your followers to a Mastodon server. (Or, at least, you will be able to do this just as soon as Threads finishes rolling out its federation.) Bluesky makes it even easier. But regardless, you’re still posting somewhere that isn’t yours.

The Internet has long given us a place to call our own, though. It’s called a domain name. You can register one for just a few bucks a year, like I did with aaronrosspowell.com, and that can be your home forever, no matter what megacorporations come and go. Many services, including blogging tools and newsletter platforms, will let you point a domain at your site there. You should always do this, even if it costs a one-time fee to point it at your platform of choice. That way, if the platform goes away, or you decide you like hosting elsewhere, or, like Substack, your home runs into its own Nazi bar problems, moving doesn’t mean losing everything. Google still knows where you are. Links to your writing still work. You’re not locked in. In most cases, you can export your context from your old host, import it into your new one, and happily continue with the same point of presence you’ve always had.

But the problem with blogging and newsletters is that they’re not social media. And most of our internet conversations—most of the social web—happens today in the back and forth of things that look like tweets, not the things that look like blog posts. So even if you have your own blog, with your own domain, you’re missing out on much of the social presence and interactions unless you’re also on Bluesky, or Threads, or wherever else. And going to those places, in addition to a blog, puts us right back in the precarious and cumbersome spot we started at the top of this post.

In an ideal world, then, what we’d have is a single home, under our own control, with our own domain that can’t be taken from us, where we can write blog posts, but also things that look like tweets, and have those appear in all the others places, like Threads or Bluesky or wherever, and have it so if people reply to us in those places, we see the replies all gathered together in our home base, where we can respond and join the conversation. And if it’s even more ideal, when new social media platforms come along, we can, with just a few clicks, add them to our distribution and interaction system, too. In other words, this ideal world is one of “publish once, in a place we own, distribute everywhere, and interact with everyone.”

Sounds pretty neat, right? Well, it’s what you’re reading right now. aaronrosspowell.com is hosted on Micro.blog, which is 90% what you’d expect a blogging tool to be: write posts, publish them, have them appear on your website, where people can leave comments. (And, with an optional upgrade, subscribe to them via email.) If you write something less than 300 characters, Micro.blog will format it like a tweet. Write something longer and it’ll prompt you for a title and format it like a blog post.

But the magic, and the reason Micro.blog and services like it are the way the social web ought to work, comes in what it calls “Sources.” These are other platforms, including many social media platforms, Micro.blog can automatically syndicate everything you write to. And for many of them, it can pull back in replies so you can have a conversation without leaving the Micro.blog interface.

Here’s what it currently supports:

• Medium
• Mastodon
• LinkedIn
• Tumblr
• Flickr
• Bluesky
• Nostr
• Pixelfed
• Threads

And it’ll pull in and let me reply to mentions from Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as follow people from both right inside the Micro.blog interface.

In practice, then, a tool like Micro.blog means you can focus your attention on your permanent Internet home, which lives at an address you own, while not giving up the social web. As new tools and platforms plug into the social web, your home will plug into those, as well.

Of course, Micro.blog might go out of business or become unusable, just like any other blogging and social web platform you could host with. But because all of the content, and address it lives at, are under your control, you can just take them to a new platform or self-hosted tool and have lost nothing.

This is exciting technology because it points to a more personal and robust future for the web by looking back at the way it used to be. We used to have our own websites, and they used to connect with each other through links and comments. Big social media platforms took those connections away from all of us and moved them under their own control. The lesson Twitter taught us is we need to be wary of this aggregation and ceding of ownership.

A return to socially connected (micro)blogging is how we make the Internet better and more future-proof, and more social, too.