The Rebrand

[crossposted from Substack]

I posted on Bluesky on December 30th that my personal goal for 2025 was to fully remove Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), Google (Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, etc), and Amazon from my life by the end of the year. I still don’t know where i’m going to end up setting up shop. But i’ve been questioning for a couple years now whether i even need social media at all.

I want to foster expanding my attention span in an era where corporations are intentionally and forcefully shrinking that. I want nuance, depth, and connection. I’d love to have a little space where i can conveniently see life updates from my friends, posts about their day, their activities, how they’re feeling and who they’re feeling it with. But what we have is Facebook, where people are mostly sharing political links about how bad everything is, which i don’t need. You’re preaching to the choir, all of you. I just want to find joy in life again. Or we have Bluesky, which is based on Twitter. Twitter was designed to share short updates, more or less exactly what i described, but quickly became a town hall which incubated wider discussions and brought people together in ways we couldn’t have imagined. For a brief moment it was beautiful. Then we quickly realized that the 140 character limit made nuance difficult, bad faith readings inevitable, and bred mostly rage.

I kind of want GeoCities back. NeoCities is a thing. Maybe that’s what i need. Also there’s a feature-for-feature rebuild of MySpace out there, called SpaceHey. I like it. But also, as a feature-for-feature rebuild of a web site that had its heyday 20 years ago, all of the frustrating and annoying limitations of Web 2.0 are there. You can’t add photos directly to blogs, they have to be hotlinked, for example.

I don’t know. I might move my main web presence to here, Substack, but there’s a lot of things i find frustrating about this site as well.

Anyway. I’ll probably post more about my journey into finding happiness through inconvenience as i make these changes. I don’t know if Substack is my final destination, but if i do make that decision, you can bet i’ll rebrand this blog as Paradigm Pudding III. In the meantime, i’ve set up a Linktree to point to all the places you might find me. I’ll keep that updated as i move around. At this time, two-thirds of the links are either Meta or Google, so, uh. Yeah. Expect that to change. Actually, now that i’ve finally posted a blog, maybe i’ll add Substack to the Linktree, to offset some of that.

The biggest thing is gonna be YouTube. They have no serious competitors. If anyone can figure that one out, i’d be eternally grateful.

Leave a comment below with your favorite Google, Meta, and Amazon alternatives, or what obsolete media services you miss, or a recommended beer for non-beer-drinkers, or really great vegan recipes.