A blog for author-based writing
I spent a few hours today and yesterday working out a strategy for social media and being public.
I want social media to be a nice storefront, showing only the good trail. But what I write is raw thoughts, from the angles I actually care about.
I ended up landing on a split between "author-based" writing and "reader-based" writing.
Reader-based writing is aimed at the reader. It solves some problem the reader has, it's interesting (otherwise the reader doesn't subscribe).
But for me, as the author, the raw thoughts are the interesting part.
The first solution I came up with was discobrain, a private notebook built on Discourse. Raw thoughts go in there, and I pull the "quality" posts out of it.
But then I remembered https://simonwillison.net/ and got inspired to publish raw thoughts on my site instead.
This means I have to keep an eye on some minimum level of quality, but it also lets me publish less polished stuff (nobody sees it unless they go looking for it).
And there's still value in it. Maybe at some point I'll need to link back to some raw thought or idea.
And on top of that, I don't have to filter by interest, because there are no subscriptions on the site. Nobody gets bothered, nobody unsubscribes, and no algorithm breaks if I post something irrelevant.