These past few years, there’s been a drastic change in how I indulge in social media. It all started when Elon Musk took over Twitter and burned it into a massice cesspool/hellsite. I jumped ship, albeit gradually (but surely) onto Mastodon and I have argued my reasons clearly here. It’s not easy leaving my 900 plus followers and following and 91k tweets behind but it had to be done. I can’t live with the conscience of contributing to Elon Musk’s funds.
Moving to Mastodon, I learned to embrace open source and the small web. For every giant corporation and monopoly out there like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon etcetera, there’s a ready open source or small web alternative. All of these monoliths, they have no qualms manipulating and selling your data and information to the highest bidder. Some were even directly involved in genocide like Google and Facebook. Apart from leaving Twitter for Mastodon, I have also switched from Instagram to Pixelfed and deleted my Facebook account ages ago. While still in its infancy, Loops is a promising open source alternative to Tik Tok. I wish I could delete Whatsapp for Signal though, if only all of my family, friends and colleagues would follow suit because otherwise it would be pointless.
Yes I understand, it is still impossible to completely detach myself from the oligarchs due to work commitment or financial reasons (all the popular platforms/apps are free but at the price of your soul) but I did my best whenever I can. Which brings us to the topic of today’s post. I’ve tried Micro.blog, a new blogging platform from Manton Reece in 2019 which offers a really pretty and minimalist design and integration with the fediverse. But I stopped short from paying the $5 a month subscription because you know MYR23 a month for a lifetime is still a lot for me in the long run. But now that Manton had offered the cheaper $1 per month Micro.one, I could not resist.
So today marks the first day of switching, hopefully permanently to Micro.blog from my old blogs Afifplc and Afif Chronicles at Google. Those two sites had been criminally neglected anyway for these past few years with very few updates, most recently because I loath to continue to be associated with Google. I love how this site utilizes Markdown markup language which I also use in my Obsidian note-taking app (which I switched to from OneNote and Notion). You should embrace open source and the small web too.
Here’s to a new beginning in blogging and to hopefully, more updates from me.
