Why I stopped copy-pasting myself online

There’s a certain level of professionalism in most public spaces. To a degree, at least.

When I first started my Micro.blog site, I thought it’d be this anonymous little corner where I would post literally anything. Long rambling essays with sometimes polarizing opinions, rants, random things I’m into. Stories about life; dumb shit I’ve done over the years.

But the longer I was here, the more I realized this isn’t just some faceless message board. It’s an ecosystem full of intelligent people. People who, for the most part, agree on the basic fundamentals of life. Mostly left-leaning, kind, compassionate folks who all have one big thing in common: they love writing. Sometimes curating. And they believe in the indie web. Or social web. Or open web. Whatever you wanna call it.

So while most of my circle is firmly in the Trump bad, democracy good camp, I’m not sure everyone here would love reading about “things I like about LaVeyan Satanism,” random trauma dumps, or raw, unfiltered stories from when I was an addict.

Those are just a few silly little examples, but you get the point.

There’s etiquette in places like Micro.blog or Wordpress that you don’t necessarily see on Tumblr or Bluesky. Every platform has its own vibe, but full-on blogging spaces tend to be less chaotic than the social media firehose. I’m not doing this professionally by any means, but I also don’t wanna be the guy who shows up to the party already shitfaced, making a ruckus in a dirty stretched out t-shirt, pajama pants and orange Crocs.

I think I’ve found a decent middle ground. Here, I mostly stick to tech, gaming, random news. Indie web musings. Links. I like having this space. It’s the only place I know with a community of people into the same nerdy stuff I’m into. I don’t have any friends IRL who wouldn’t be bored to literal death if I started talking about self-hosting RSS feeds or a public beta of iOS.

For a while now, I’ve wanted my online presence to be interconnected. I like the idea of POSSE (publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere), but I don’t like limiting myself like that. Bluesky is for jokes and seeing how my peers are reacting to the world. Tumblr is for visuals, aesthetic niches, fandoms. Reddit is its own thing. Now Digg.com is even back — and it’s still a different crowd than Reddit.

The POSSE thing makes perfect sense for brands or sane people who have one thing to say everywhere. But I like different platforms for what they uniquely bring to the table. Tumblr and Micro.blog both fall under “microblogging” but they couldn’t feel more different.

So I’ve stopped trying to make everything match. I like the name grubz for this blog — a jumbled play on my first and last name that’s still mostly anonymous to anyone who knows me IRL. I’m playing with other domains and separating this blogging identity from my socials. Everything’s still linked, but I don’t like using the handle “grubz.net” for my Bluesky, which I rarely cross-post to anyway. I have a link to the blog in my bio, and that’s enough.

I’m not building a brand. Just a persona. I like keeping my real name out of my socials, for the sake of privacy. These days literally everyone — from the DoorDash driver to HR at your new job — is probably looking you up on Facebook the second you leave the room.

So I like having at least partial anonymity. And what I love about the web is that it still feels wildly different from place to place. Why put all of your eggs in one basketone egg in a bunch of different baskets?