Because I've started using Cohost I've been writing "blog posts" again. This has made me realize one thing, and really driven home a thing I already knew:
- I missed writing blog posts.
- The reason I stopped writing blog posts, went all in on Twitter, and moved directly to Mastodon when Twitter lost me, is when I try to write blog posts I get really carried away.
I kind of need Twitter/Mastodon, because there's that bit of friction to going on and on and without that friction I do go on and on. This is actually why my original Wordpress blog failed! I was not able to bound my thoughts. I'd start writing my ideas on a subject, and then I'd start fitting in asides and then asides within asides and eventually it would be too large with too many loose ends to finish. I dropped one essay-length analysis of the blogosphere in 2006 and barely posted after that despite sinking hours and hours into writing three or four long aborted essays. They were real good essays but you know what's the best essay? ONE YOU FINISH.
Cohost, tragically, disincentives very long posts (because it cuts you off with a "read more" after about a screen length) but there is no friction to very long posts, so it's bad to do it but I wind up doing it. Both my attempts to write anything other than a short joke have now blossomed into (I think pretty good, but long) "blog posts" proper. I gotta figure out how I'm gonna handle this.
(I'm thinking, right now, that probably the optimal way to longpost on Cohost is to structure your post so that all the critical ideas and phrases are in the ~3 paragraphs before the Read More break, and then all asides or elaboration happen after the break. This is actually probably a good way to write any essay? It means nobody gets lost in a meandering aside before they get to your point. But also when I read Serious Journalism that is structured this way it seems a little formless to me.)
