Personal Web Presence

I’m in the midst of an identity crisis.

Regarding Internet identity and community, my presence on Twitter felt most interconnected. I’ve had my website(s) longer, and they mean more to me than Twitter.

But with the changes over there and the disruption to much of my community, coupled with a general dislike for Musk’s governance thus far, the community I had is gone.

It’s sad. I moved from being a guy who uses WordPress to talking with others about it via Twitter, which eventually led me to people I worked with in my freelance days, and then ultimately to Automattic, where I’ve worked for the last 10 years.

There are other options. Mastodon, Threads, Tumblr, Bluesky, t2/Pebble (RIP). I have accounts on all of them, but none feel quite right.

I keep returning to how to make a personal web presence, a true home page, back on a regular website. I have this site, obviously, and an experimental site (https://bk.cx). That site has much of my short-form content—including my Twitter archives—and federates via ActivityPub. The home page doesn’t reveal all that.

There’s a lot of legacy on this site. It’s a multinetwork multisite with over a decade of content, but I’m considering breaking this site out to be a regular WordPress site again.

There’s now so much content hidden away between various social media sites, access required courseware, and more. I recall in my college days, every professor had a website and you could see what they posted for their class to see. Now, I can’t see any content from my MBA classes a few days after the last day of finals.

As much as we progress, we take steps back too.

The benefit of the Internet is the interconnectivity and that, by default, should be open and free.