Manton on Microblogs

For a new project, Manton Reece is defining a microblog post.

Manton and I care about many of the same things. (We’ve known each other since the ’90s when we were both in the Frontier community.) Among the things we both care about are the virtues of decentralization and of owning your own writing.

I don’t have much in the way of details of what he’s working on — but it sounds like a project I’ve had in the back of my mind for quite a while. Since I’m more interested in the thing existing than actually doing it myself, I’m very happy to see Manton working on it.

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Is the web we lost gone forever? Was it a brief golden age before the rise of Facebook and Twitter and The Algorithms of Engagement?

Or is the current period a brief blip in time, where we turned the wrong corner and now we’re getting back on the right road?

I used to think that the very structure of the web meant that it was always inevitable that we’d get back to the great web. I’m no longer that kind of progressive — I realize now that loss is real, and usually permanent, and that good things have to be fought for, not by a handful of heroes but by a bunch of regular people like me and Manton.