If 2010-2020 was the Great Social Media Consolidation, looks like 2022 and beyond are gonna be the Great Innanet Decentralization, and I’m 1oo% present for it. Thanks to our friends #indieweb and #fediverse, you already know how easy it is to plug into some great communities on the interwebs while keeping your content under your control and being able to keep a record of the dialog around it at your own site.

If you’re reading this on my website, then just look down where on a traditional blog there’d be a “leave a comment” doohickey there for you to fill out a form and say how you feel about what you read. But here you can just comment on any of the syndicated sites where this same content exists and it’ll find its way back here via “a series of tubes” I’ve arranged. And with some hacky tomfoolery, my comments here will flow back to wherever they need to go in most places. To me, this is what real social media is supposed to be like– Your media on in a space you control and interact with the right circle of people you want to see it. And if you want, you can network your site with others, forming a mesh network of sites. That’s the premise (and promise) of decentralized social networking I’ve stressed again and again here.

Today one of my “transit content” friends I’ve followed for years is finding out first had why this is a good idea, thanks to the whole Substack debacle. Reece Martin (@RM_Transit) who runs RMTransit on YouTube experienced this firsthand by having to make the hard decision to move his popular Substack newsblog to WordPress, but to me that means he just upgraded. By switching he’s able to:

• Immediately take advantage of RSS feeds, newsletters, and the mobile app.
• A whole ass ecosystem of plugins to make your blog do everything except tuck him in at night.
• Implement the ActivityPub plugin and publish content into the fediverse
• Grab the Indieweb plugins and use Webmentions and syndicate comments and content with other blogs
• Use the above with Bridgy and crosspost, backfeed and more with more SNSs
• Use IFTTT, Zapier and more to automate external things like kicking off a job to auto post his video content on his new blog when he comes out with a new video on YouTube.

I’m happy he decided to go this route and I hope others out there do the same. If your message and voice are your livelihood, there’s no excuse for not using all the products available to make sure it stays that way.