I registered the objc.net domain back in 2000 and set up a blog using the Blogger service. My goal at the time was to establish some sort of Apple developer audience as a prelude to releasing my open source project Cocotron. I don’t know how much the blog achieved of the goal, maybe the audience was only one person, but ultimately the release of Cocotron would successfully alter the course of my professional career in the intended way, i.e. improve it.
I largely gave up on blogging when I started using Twitter in 2008, I was able to connect with other developers more directly and with the shift to mobile development you had an explosion of news and information where Twitter formed a funnel of that information. Additionally, Google reduced Blogger’s capabilities by shutting down the FTP publishing mechanism I was using so I stopped altogether. I had wanted to return to some mechanism of longer form posts but it was easy to just use Twitter and put it off, well no longer.
Fortunately someone else in my life needed help setting up their own personal brand site and after messing around with the basics of a couple static pages I decided to try out WordPress like millions of others. The folks over at Digital Ocean make this super easy (and cheap) with a preconfigured droplet, a little extra mucking about to get SSL working the site was setup. This inspired me to use it for myself and here we are, I have a blog again!
Over time I have been growing more unsatisfied with Twitter as a forum, the 2016-2020 era on the platform definitely didn’t help and changed the whole tone of things. The aggressive use of Home feed and topics also changed things a lot. I originally enjoyed following specific people and seeing in-order posts and continued using Twitter in that fashion. I could tell some people continued to use it like that but the signal/noise ratio kept getting lower and I found fewer people engaging, lots of weirder timing on responses and I was regularly battling to keep garbage out of my feed. Elon Musk buying the platform and the weird debacle around it just made it all easy to move onto something else.
For some time I had been using a script to delete my unpopular tweets (i.e. little engagement) automatically and had wanted to control my posts more but it was all kind of annoying to do, I had a lot of tweets, Twitter doesn’t make this easy, and the tools are primitive. Leaving the platform entirely makes this easier, instead of spending money in perpetuity on whatever half-baked Musk idea I can just erase it all and move on. Fortunately the extremely handy https://tweetdelete.net exists so I paid the $15 to wipe my entire history, cheaper than a couple months of Twitter Premium!
