I haven’t had much fun online lately.

For all the obvious reasons, of course: the news is bad, the good jokes are harder to come by (when people feel like making them), most of the platforms have enshittified themselves into an algorithmic stupor, etc. But also because I’ve been feeling the past couple of years that, generally, too many people on the internet are engaged in a mode of social interaction that no longer mirrors my own.

I think this sense started creeping up on me sometime in the early half of 2024, scrolling through TikTok (when I was still on TikTok), when I began to see a good number of videos from accounts either offering tips on how to work your way to 10,000 followers or actively pursuing that same goal. These weren’t accounts from news outlets or journalists seeking eyeballs, nor from brands seeking customers, nor from politicians seeking votes. They were just the personal accounts of random people who all somehow collectively got it in their heads that 10,000 followers was where things really got cookin’.

And this behavior followed me to Bluesky, where so many of the new accounts migrating from Twitter post-November 2024 tried to initiate mass follow-for-follow campaigns to fast-forward their way to an audience of thousands.

And it struck me, encountering this repeatedly, how much of “social” media (which we might as well start calling engagement media) is now just about the numbers—about the accumulation of follows, views, likes, reposts, often with the unspoken (or sometimes even declared!) aim to eventually make money off it. I think there might be a not-insignificant portion of the population that sees the whole system as a zero-sum game, where those with small followings are just the sad suckers who can’t accrue. Meeting new people, keeping in touch, exchanging ideas thoughtfully, maybe even eventually making friends and forming bonds ... these all seem like afterthoughts now for so many.

I first got online during the AIM/Geocities/Angelfire era, and by college was keeping up with friends on early blog networks. My crew’s chosen space was LiveJournal, the circle was small, each post was like a postcard or longer letter tossed off to everyone at once (publicly or privately), and each reply was like a postcard or letter back. The reveals were more personal, the feelings more raw, the ads nonexistent, the frequency of posts more manageable, never a deluge.

But everyone grew up, got scared that LiveJournal was embarrassing or got frustrated that it wasn’t immediate enough, and slowly stopped posting regularly there as Facebook, then Twitter, then Instagram came into the picture. Nowadays, it feels like my friends keep up mostly through Instagram Stories, possibly the most sterile social environment yet to be conceived, with follow-up conversation relegated to private one-on-one chats where one-sentence replies or simple emoji reacts are the norm.

I was lamenting the transition with one of those old LiveJournal friends on the phone the other day, wondering if there was any way to still chase that slower, more intimate and communal mode of being online. “Maybe it’s just gone,” she said, inviting me to think of the generations before ours that didn’t get to experience it at all, and the generations after that only know the current morass. “Maybe we were just lucky enough to come along at the right time. Maybe we should just be glad we got to be there for it while it was happening.”

Which, fair enough. Maybe I’m feeling nostalgic for a bygone era and need to get over it. But I’m still unsure where that leaves me now, having quit virtually every social platform but Bluesky and Mastodon, where few friends have joined me. Other than that, I have this blog and a new Leaflet.pub blog I started for my ongoing reading project, neither of which I’ve told many people about. Where would I tell them about it?

Writing about digital sovereignty recently, Matt Pearce hit on something that resonated:

To become sovereign — to control the most meaningful decisions about your own existence — is to exit an existing status quo, sometimes at steep cost. Could be a democratic nation risking American tariffs to build a domestic tech sector, or a journalist sacrificing the reach of extractive platforms like YouTube or Instagram to build more independent modes of distribution.

What I’ve been pondering lately is what it means to become socially sovereign, online. What does it look like, minus the big platforms, to still try to connect with (not amass—never amass) people in the corners of the internet where I remain?

I was perusing other blogs on Leaflet the other day, through the platform’s Discover page, and I came across a post introducing a phrase I hadn’t heard before: working with the garage door open. As described in the post:

Working with the garage door open is a quiet, public way of working. It is not demanding attention, but invites interested parties to stop by and engage. It is accountable to the act of work, but not necessarily to some grander scheme or external demand.

I like this, and it feels like a particularly good counter-ethos in an increasingly “like and subscribe” world. I don’t want to reach everyone, or even most, and wouldn’t know what to say to them if I did. I don’t have a niche to focus on or a hobbyhorse to ride. I don’t have a particular area of expertise to dispense sage wisdom about. I just want a space for my thoughts as I work them out, and I want people to feel like they can drop in for a chat as I do so, and hopefully sometimes they will.

Maybe I just need to find more ways to let them know the door’s open. Consider this post a start.