In recent weeks I have been a bit of a restless soul. Moving things around despite my insistence that you didn’t need to do it. It’s been part of a long-running plan for me to straighten everything out and stop spreading myself too thin in projects, but I digress.

I’ve moved my hosting from Ghost to WordPress, and now to Micro.blog. Despite a few hiccups and me not being 100% happy there is a certain freedom that is felt by just posting everything to one place. This is by far the biggest reason I choose to jump ship so soon and put all of my posts in the same place.

Photos I would usually post to Instagram come here, status update posts like books I am readingcome here, and are combined with the rest of my writing. I’m not worried about where this goes and that goes. Moving things backwards and forward and breaking links — it’s all just here.

I have been on micro.blog for a couple of years, it started as a way for me to quit Twitter in 2018, but took until now for me to really get invested in it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve rage-quit a couple of times because I was frustrated in the offerings, but always returned. This time feels more real, and I’ve worked out what I want to do with my content going forwards.

Those few times I have quit mean I completely understand the frustrations people have with the service. It has a considerable barrier to entry, but this is somewhat intentional and somewhat freeing. You have to give up some notions you have on blogging, and let some things be dictated for you. You also need to learn a few bits of code to mould the site to make it yours (mine is months in the making of learning CSS and Hugo).

I could wax lyrical about my change in thoughts about my blog, my frustrations with never achieving what I wanted, and now my more personal content creation. I am sure micro.blog, @manton and the excellent community have helped me with this transition. The people that use mb can be more than a little preachy, because of these barriers to entry does attract an overwhelming ‘type’ of user, but I have had overwhelmingly positive experiences with people that makes it all worth it.

Everything will still be cross posted everywhere I can, and I still check in to Twitter a couple of times a day (I can’t quit it as it’s my social media addiction) so nothing much really changes. I wrote this as a kind of explainer to myself more than anything else, but now I have worked out what this is for I just hit post and forget about it. Perfect.