Continuing my push to extract myself from social media I released a new /tweets page for micro-posts that don't warrant a full blown blog post, literally it's a place for things that would have been tweets. I launched it on Halloween, I used AI to build it in less than an hour and I already love it.
I think this is another example of agentic coding eliminating the moat around social media and allowing normies to take back the internet. Back in the 90s when a lot of the world started coming online no intro to computers class was complete without a lesson in HTML, the final project was usually to build a personal web page.
All of us learned how to right click and view source on web pages; you want to know how your favorite site pulled off their slick design? It was right there for you to see, copy, and adapt for yourself. Back in those early days the thinking was that pretty much everyone would have a home page, a lot of times very modest hosting space and an email address came with your internet service, but in reality learning how to set it all up and maintain it was too much for your average person. I don't want this to turn into a history lesson, but eventually the iterative attempts to help make it easier for everyone to have their own space on the internet brought us social media, and here we are.
I think it's ironic that the value proposition of social media is, generally speaking, making it easier to have your own space on the internet. Just sign up for an account and get to sharing your thoughts with your friends, a lot of folks don't remember this but most early internet communication tools were built to be open, I consider early IM tools like AIM, ICQ and others to be nascent social media platforms in their own rights. They solved a real problem, email was and still is terrible and IRC was not super accessible and could be downright dangerous at times. But most of those tools had open protocols that let anyone build a client so you weren't locked into a single ecosystem.
Nowadays social media platforms don't even want you to post links to other sites, forget about open protocols. Now that we've reached a critical mass of users and most of their users don't remember a world before social media they've decided that it's more profitable to lock everyone into their walled gardens. We no longer experience the internet as it is, we get to experience it through the lens of the Twitter, or Meta, or Reddit algorithm, and on top of that they are now starting to ask us to pay for the privilege.
Last time I logged onto Twitter I was greeted with a popup that lists a range of possible subscriptions ranging from $8 to $100 a month. With the higher, more expensive tiers giving you access to their AI platform as well. It's clear rent-seeking, the internet was already free and open, and I can pay for 5 years of hosting services and run whatever software I want, yes, including my own private LLM for fractions of what they are asking me to pay for their closed off, filtered version of the internet.
The irony of all of this is that their hubristic behavior is being accelerated by the advances made in AI, which is precisely the tool that millions of people need to unshackle themselves from the big social media platforms. It used to be the case that folks like me who were willing to devote entire weekends sometimes to maintaining their own personal websites were in such a minority that we could easily be ignored, but now we're in a whole new ballgame.
So, please go check out my new /tweets page, it was a lot of fun to build and I'm looking forward to adding more features in the coming months.