2016 was the last time that I was using WordPress to express my thoughts in written form and directly share them with the rest of the world − since then I shared a lot, but mainly on social media.

Since 2016 a lot of things have happened on the internet. Especially when it comes to social media and how we interact with each other online, how we discover new things and share them. To put the timeframe since I lasted wrote blog into perspective: Back then Instagram did not have Instagram Stories. Instagram itself was very established back then already, but nowhere near to now. Not even talking about TikTok which needed a pandemic to take off in the mainstream.

A platform that I also constantly used since around 2009 was Twitter. The whole saga around Twitter becoming X was then actually the reason I started to explore alternatives to mainstream social media platforms again. I was an avid user of the Twitter client Tweetbot, where I didn’t post a lot but was reading a lot. But after Elon Musk took over Twitter in fall 2022 it was only a matter of time until 3rd party clients would meet their fate.

And so one day suddenly Tweetbot stoped working – without any warning to both its users and indie developers.

After some initial shock I started to search the web for alternatives to Twitter and I stumbled upon Mastodon − something I knew existed but never considered using. Luckily the developers of Tweetbot, Tapbots in some form anticipated the collapse of “old school” Twitter and soon released a native Mastodon client called Ivory.

The first weekend was pure joy – downloading the app, starting from zero (in general something I value in the digital space, the joy of wiping a device and starting with a clean slate) and slowly building a new network – account by account, discovering new profiles by seeing others boost their posts, curating lists and slowly finding my tribe(s) on Mastodon.

Back then there was a lot of discussion around blogging and how we build our own persona on the web again. One article especially resonated with me – it was an article on The Verge by Monique Judge called “Bring back personal blogging“. I shared one quote from this article on my brand-new Mastodon profile:

„Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web. Tell your stories, build your community, and talk to your people. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.“

Monique Judge, The Verge

That’s exactly what I want to (re)discover with this blog.