Rusty Niall's Notepad

I joined Mastodon and stopped posting on Twitter about a month before the silly man came along. I like Mastodon. After the initial exodus, only five or so acquaintances of mine are posting on the site and half of them are using a cross posting client while they remain at the bird place, the occasional RT informing us of this nefarious practice.

I chose to remain on Mastodon because I have managed to curate an interesting little feed that keeps me amused and inspired rather than on a constant hair trigger. Mastodon has also served as a good source of information as far as open source and fediverse resources are concerned. Through this I was reminded of the write.as platform and and that I still have an active account on it.

It was weird looking through some of the poems that I had posted seven years ago. I could see what I was trying to do with them, something similar to what I'm going to try right now, a publicly viewable notebook of early drafts and fragments. One thing I notice about a lot of my earlier writings is a certain tone of testosterone-tinged anger an self righteousness. It's all a bit cringe. I'm older now and I spend most of my days as the only man in an otherwise female household. The testosterone levels aren't as high as they used to be and long may it remain so.

So, I'm going to resume posting here, with a similar ethos of making it somewhere to post unpolished and spontaneous work, something to share on the socials or even on my substack.

The substack is something that I feel a little bit conflicted about, in some ways there's a great convenience in how I can make use of tools that dovetail with email, blogging and podcasting. At the same time, I've been burned so many times by centralised media and platforms. It's all good fun until they decide that they're not making enough of a profit and that's when algorithms come into play, or some odious billionaire decides to make it their new plaything. Maybe I'm hedging my bets here in a similar way that my nefarious, cross posting acquaintances are?

As far as writing is concerned, it's best not to overthink things. So, I'll stop overthinking about the platforms I post on and what I post on them. This is my public notebook, a forgiving space where drafts and discarded ideas can exist without feeling any pressure to achieve great things. If something I write here feels like it’s worth developing, it’ll end up on the substack where it will have recorded narration as well as finding its way into the inboxes of subscribers. That means there’s less pressure on whatever I post here. You are very welcome to have a little peek whenever you feel inclined.