Untangling...

I am a creature of habit. Trying to untangle myself from Meta is proving to be more of a challenge everyday. 

I thought I found a way to give blog notifications through this site only to discover that it will only send them to 10 people and, I know I was shocked too, more than 10 people said I want you to send this to me when I posted about it on Facebook. 

So now I'm looking (again) at migrating everything to a different site. Substack is the one everyone uses but Katie has asked me not to. There are some Nazi and anti trans pockets there. I read a few great writers on Substack, and I don't condemn them using it, but I don't go wandering around the site looking for other things. I think every single hosting site has these issues. But when your child says please don't, you don't. 

The challenge is other hosting sites aren't free. Substack is free for the writer unless you monetize your site, then it takes a percentage of that. I don't think I'd ever have a cause to monetize so it would work for that. But again, off the table.

So Ghost io is the one she found for me that has fewer issues. One of the reasons is that it's not free. You are less likely to want to post hate if you actually have to pay for it, right? But my cheap ass is like, wait, I've never paid to post my blog before, now I would have to pay? What? But honestly, of course I should probably have to pay. I mean Blogger has been hosting for free for years. And I understand that part of that is because it's tied to my Google account and so they mine everything I do for advertisers. Google makes plenty of money off of me.

Starting new things is always overwhelming. That's part of it too, I know that. Looking at an unfamiliar layout, trying to figure out how to make it work. But I did copy and paste yesterday's post and sent it out into the world and it worked so that's a good start.

Also have been switching to posting on Bluesky instead of Facebook or Instagram (except for the posts working out how to leave Facebook and letting people know where to find me). That's also different. Not as many people there so it's not as big of a time suck, I will say that. But not as many people there so it's not as interactive. Thus less of a time suck.

It's funny, when Facebook was just starting to hit the mainstream, moving away from just college kids, I had zero urge to use it. All the younger girls in the office had it, from when they were in school, and kept telling me I needed it. I just didn't see that I did. Then when I opened my massage studio Brent set me up a Facebook page for it and a personal one. He thought I should blog about massage as a way to gain clientele. 

That didn't happen, but my personal page started to grow. I was working from home handling the transfer of KFC to the new agency and running my massage studio out of the basement. No co-workers. Katie at school, Brent at work. It was boring. Facebook, and especially the old boards for Mousehunt, gave me a place to socialize. And then I never looked back. 

My massage blog went away, George got his own page, then I set up Totally Random But and it got a page. For along time the joke was how much faster George's page grew than my blog page. But the internet is for cats so what did I expect? After George passed I kept his page up and running for awhile until it really started to bug me that new people were following it even though the first post was about how he died. It seemed really morbid to me. And you know if I think what you are doing is morbid, it's pretty fucking morbid. 

But it's been like sixteen years. 

I'm still not sure I'm leaving. I know I'm limiting my use, no matter what happens. I know I'm figuring out how to change my blog notifications, the censoring really bugged me. But I'm not sure I want to walk away from the people on Facebook who aren't moving to Bluesky. I might change to posting only on Bluesky and Facebook can have all of my old stuff but nothing new. Considering I don't believe for a moment they haven't already helped themselves to all of that. But it would change my usage there to checking in on friends, commenting on their things but not posting anything myself. 

And this is the trap that we are all in. How important is that community to you? Can you replace it somewhere else? Can you move it to real life or to a new online space? For me the challenge is that my community is world wide. And even the people that aren't in another country are all over this one. And it's a big country. 

I'm still figuring it out. And I know the clock is ticking. 

It's funny to me...I built my community through Mousehunt while the whole time Facebook built a better mousetrap, and now I'm stuck. 

Squeak.