If They Can Take It, You Don’t Own It: A Case for Blogs

Today Elon Musk decided to limit non-paying twitter accounts to viewing only 600 tweets per day – 300 if you’re a newer account. This is as many as an active person might browse in an hour, and is the latest decision to devalue the social media site as a microblogging platform. Prioritizing paid tweets, shifts in moderation enforcement, making the space far less safe for marginalized groups… its collapse is, many speculate, eminant.

Many – wanting time to get established or just not wanting to patronize a site owned by Elon Musk, have already fled to sites established as alternatives to Twitter. Cohost. Mastodon. Blue Sky, basically aiming to be “pre-Musk Twitter” without really acknowledging that the site wasn’t that great back then.

For those of us creative entrepreneurs – artists, writers, game developers – social media has become a primary platform where we can connect with our fans and engage in the “soft sell” dance that is becoming a valued member of a community to interest people in supporting us through patronage and purchase. These platforms all share the same fundamental issue, however: You don’t own them.

If they can take it, you didn’t own it

When I started writing books back in 2011, one of the first pieces of marketing advice I learned was that you needed your own space. Social media sites shut down. Usenet vanished seemingly overnight. Facebook kept changing its policies. Changes in ownership and venture capitalists looking to “disrupt” without regard for whose fingers got crushed.

What you needed was a mailing list. And a blog, hosted on your own domain, not a blogger or Geocities or other free alternative. I’ll address the latter first.

Blogging

I’ve had a lot of blogs. Even before I was writing books, when I had nothing to sell, I had a blog as creative output for short stories, creative musings, tabletop rpg adventures, text adventure games. Stuff I wanted to share, and needed a place to host less ephemeral than dropping into a newsgroup. Given free, to the community and asking for nothing in return but maybe you drop a comment or sign my guestbook. That was what the early internet was like.

Nobody knew what they were doing. It was a glorious mess.

When I started writing professionally in 2011 I made sure to buy my domain – mcoorlim dot com – as a professional landing place. I did a lot of blogging – some just musings like this one – but also sharing my work, my process, and posting “things of interest to the kind of person who would like my books.” I’ve migrated hosts a few times, wiped the blog slate clean and started over more than once, but this site, this blog, will be resuming its role as the central point of my internet presence.

My poor, poor, neglected blog.

Newsletters

I’ve been paying for a newsletter provider for over a decade, and I’ve sent maybe two or three newsletters in the last five years. Whatever list I had has gone ice cold. I’ll be starting from scratch. But it’s necessary to keep people engaged – the friends and fans who’ve taken the extra step to actually subscribe to your newsletter are those invested enough to actually open it.

So what to send them? Links, mostly. Links to the week’s blog posts, any youtube videos, any other cool shit you ran across online. Something more conversational and targeted than the blog, because the newsletter isn’t going to fall in front of the eyes of a stranger and lure them into your world, it’s for the people who’re already there.

So, that’s it

That’s the plan for the latter half of 2023 as the digital world crumbles. Get back to blogging. Resurrect the newsletter. Rely less on spaces that can be taken from you at a rich prick’s whim, because all things end. There was an internet before Twitter, there will be an internet after. Network with your fellow creatives, share their blogs around, and they’ll share yours. Become a node in your own network.

You want to follow me, subscribe to this blog. Sign up for my mailing list.