Microblogging is for micro blogs

published: 2 December 2024

This rant is dedicated to people on the butterfly-logo place.

You have free will to use anything however you want. I can’t stop you and I don’t think I should be able to do so. Also I consume your art for free and offer only criticism. But I still have opinions. Quickly before we start - by blog I mean “place to write stuff” and by microblog I mean “place to write stuff with a character limit”. So here goes.

Don’t use microblogging platforms for big-blogging. Use a blog. When blogs are split up to fit on a microblogging platform they are awkward and annoying to read. Don’t do it.

Well maybe that was a bit harsh. I have seen some good uses of it after all such as live blogging (content warning: assisted dying). I’ll take it back a bit. Maybe it is OK sometimes. But I still don’t want to read it like that after the “live” part of live blogging is over.

One of the reasons that I have heard for not getting annoyed at people doing this is that people find it mentally easier to blog on a platform in little chunks than writing it all out before posting it.

I sympathise with this a lot but I still find it really annoying to read long long chains of posts that make up something that should really be in one post. So I propose a compromise.

Write on the microblogging platform and then copy it onto your blog. And then link it.

If you don’t have a blog, just know that I would prefer it if you did. Especially if you write long stuff regularly. I don’t expect it to be fancy, just standard WordPress or Substack thing is absolutely fine. And guess what, my example from earlier has actually done exactly that (content warning: assisted dying). Be more like Ian.

Rant over. And don’t listen to me too much, I’m just some guy anyway.