My grassy plot on the internet in a post-social media world

In the early 2000s when blogs were a thing, I decided to start one about life in Tokyo. But I wasted all my time on the customization part and trying to make it look nice. I was not disciplined enough to update it and make it valuable enough for friends or people on the internet to bookmark and check back in on.

Soon after, I was drawn into the Japanese social media site mixi. Its communities and diary function made it easy to befriend people with similar interests and give regular updates on life or just make funny posts. Mixi did not force you to use your real name and did not suggest connections through your e-mail, so you just connected with people you chose to, or people you met through interests.

Then Twitter and Facebook took over the work including Japan and they decimated mixi. Twitter allowed you anonimity and offered the discovery feature of hashtags. Facebook made it easy to connect with your old friends and see their life updates. In that way, Facebook had high utility. I could log on and see what was happening in the lives of my high school and college friends within a few minutes. I enjoyed reporting on my own life by posting to them as well.

Skip forward 20 years and we all know what happened after that. Facebook's need to improve engagement has led to an endless stream of low-value trash posts from community pages they think you might be interested in. And the posts from friends are lost.

I always enjoyed the discovery function of Twitter hashtags. Having said that, I never found myself spending more than a minute or two scrolling my feed. And I didn't find my friends on that platform either. Maybe the anonymity was not good for connecting with friends. And so I could not really connect with anyone on Twitter. Whatever I posted went out to the ether and I never got any pull.

Looking back, Japan's mixi was a great balance of anonymity and community.

In the past year, I post almost nothing on Facebook. The folies of Elon Musk have made X much less attractive. The pandemic gave a last breath to my social media life but now that it has subsided, I cannot deny how heavily the trash outweighs the utility.

But that doesn't mean nothing interesting is happening in my life. And I do want to keep connected with people on the internet. I am approaching big changes this year. And I am working on creative projects that I would love to share with friends and random people. So I am hoping a blog is a solution. I am hoping it will be a good outlet for me in this post-social media world.

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(By the way, this thumbnail photo for this post was taken at Cape Toi in Miyazaki, Japan. It is an amazing place with views of the oceans from high hills and wild horses.)

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