We broke the internet. We can still fix it

Have you ever rotated a mobile screen while reading a post on LinkedIn and lost it? Have you ever closed a social media post because content wasn’t available to read without an account? Have you ever had a hard time following the Twitter/X post spread into a thread? Have you ever missed a post of someone who you follow, but it never showed up on your feed? Have you ever struggled to find a post that you didn’t have time to read when it showed up? Have you ever been trying to find a specific past post on any of the social platforms?

Why do we do this ourselves?

We are feeding the rich with our knowledge without any benefits in return. Instead, they make content hard to read, hard to search, hard to edit, and hard to follow. And hire algorithms to throw trash into our feeds.

The most powerful aspect of the internet is that everyone can participate in shaping it. You can plug in your machine and host whatever you like in any form. You can own your data, even a full platform. You can utilize open standards (like HTTP or RSS/Atom) and give the audience freedom how to consume what you produce.

Unfortunately, we used to give up on freedom.

Making a blog is trivial and can be easily hosted for free. You can use any language or pickup platform that makes sense. With minimal investment, you can host under your domain (and you should). You can notify your readers about new content in a standard way and allow them to consume it at their pace.

You can be googleable. Or duckduckgoable. You can own your data and make it look unique if you like. Or just use plain HTML.

Social media is useful to tease the content and bring attention. Maybe discuss. But please, stop ruining the internet, and if you value what you produce and your audience, let us read properly.