Open social web: horses for courses

This month I relaunched my Ghost blog as Agentic Web News . At the same time I’ve been thinking about how I use my various social media accounts — across Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Flipboard, Threads, X, and more. Plus where this niche blog I’m writing on right now, my Leaflet, fits in.

I remember when I started ReadWriteWeb in 2003, and the excitement and optimism the tech community felt about the subject I was writing about: the two-way web, “social software”, and similar ways to describe it (this was a year before “Web 2.0” was coined). Even though RWW was relatively unknown and undiscovered back then, the people who came across it in 2003 and into 2004 were overwhelmingly positive about my blog posts. It was a rush and a pleasure interacting with that community of web tech lovers back then. Ideas and tech experiments proliferated.

I say all that to make the following point: it’s not like that in the emerging agentic web. Most of my followers on Mastodon hate it when I post about AI x web. On Bluesky, it’s mostly been polite crickets (or possibly contemptuous shrugs — I can’t tell). I’ve actually had some very unpleasant interactions on Mastodon since I launched my new blog.

I’ve perhaps let a small minority of obnoxious people get to me too much, but it has made me realize that we’re at a ‘horses for courses’ stage of the open social web. If most of the tech community on Mastodon that I’m a part of doesn’t want to hear about the agentic web, I feel like I should respect that. After all, this is supposed to be a community that supprts each other (perhaps I’m too naive on that point, though).

But then I realized, because of the cross-platform support work of @ghost.org , @ap.brid.gy , the ActivityPub folks, the @atproto.com folks, the @standard-site.atmo.garden folks, et al, that there is a Different Way. Which is:

I can post about my agentic web explorations on my Ghost ‘notes’ feature, which is a microblogging service you can follow on Mastodon, Bluesky, Flipboard, Threads, etc by following this handle: @ricmac@agenticweb.news

@ricmac.agenticweb.news.ap.brid.gy on Bluesky

That way I can use my main social handles (ricmac@mastodon.social and @ricmac.org on Bluesky) to just be more …social, I guess. I mean to say: social without having to deal with constant unpleasantness. Because, believe it or not, I’m quite a sensitive person and I don’t like battling people on social media. I am also a very individualistic, nuanced person who doesn’t take black and white positions on things like AI: that whole ‘you either love it or hate it’ thing.

So, this is the approach I will take from now on. If you are interested in my takes on AI, feel free to follow me (or not) at @ricmac@agenticweb.news on the platform of your choice.