Dave celebrated 30 years as a blogger, and he’s having a blast developing a new textcasting tool that connects WordPress and Mastodon and someday, perchance, the rest of the web of social media and Fediverse tools. Meanwhile, Manton has added Threads crossposting to Micro.blog.
I feel myself hesitating at this rapid interconnectedness. I’ll be slow to adopt this. I’ll not rush to be posting across Bluesky and Mastodon and Threads and other services. I’m still scarred from my online wipeout 10 years ago.
But as I’ve been watching Dave’s excitement and following the community discussion across Micro.blog, I’ve been thinking about Robin Sloan’s latest novel, Moonbound. In that, Sloan has imagined a delightful character named Clovis, a wandering robot that is wirelessly connected to other traveling robots in the world. Indeed, the robots share the same consciousness.
When the sun was high in the sky, Ariel found himself gaining on a robot grinding slowly along the Rath-road. Unlike Clovis, this robot was squat, barrel-shaped, and rolling on treads.
As he passed, the robot buzzed: “Hello, Ariel de la Sauvage.”
He looked at the rotund robot. “We have not met,” said Ariel. “How do you know my name …?”
“I have met you,” the robot said. “I am Clovis. In all my forms, everywhere, I am Clovis.”
“Where is the form I met?”
“I am walking to the coast. I am nearly there.”
Clovis was my favorite character in the novel. (Read it and enjoy.)
A lot of my early blogging, in the years 2000 to 2004, documented my own excitement at all the writing and publishing and discussion tools that were becoming available. I bounced from one to another but, in the summer of 2004, I settled on Textpattern. I’ve been using this for my main blog (Zuiker Chronicles, then mistersugar.com, then back to Zuiker.com) for 20 years now and I’m grateful to Team Textpattern for their steady development and ongoing stewardship of the CMS.
What’s cool about the textcasting and crossposting that Dave and Manton and others are building is that I can stay with Textpattern for my main blog and push my writing, if and when I’m ready, to a wider net. I do remember now that I am already crossposting to Mastodon (.@mistersugar@opalstack.social).
I will need to decide if, “in all my forms,” I will be mistersugar or antonzuiker—I am my name and I still love my nickname, but I stopped using mistersugar (explained here) during my social media sabbatical, and I’ve wanted to go back.
© Anton Zuiker