Breaking into the habit loop

“I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.” - @tveastman in 2018

No, I’m not going to post a screenshot of that tweet. But I will leave a link: https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040 Links are cool. They send you to other places. They interrupt your train of thought and expand your comfort zone.

Abilities I lost posting on Facebook:

-Having colors and background images
-Picking fonts, and other layout choices
-Knowing how many people saw my posts and when
-Selecting my own previews for links
-Having posts show up in the order I posted them
-Showing all of my posts to people who follow me
-Putting my posts in permanent places that people can come back to

Ok to be fair, I only have about half of those here on the Svbtle platform. But it won’t be long before I set up a more customizable blog and point https://blog.epimetheon.com to it. That’s one more thing I can’t do with Facebook!

Following a blog is not quite as convenient as following me on Facebook. But it’s not that bad, honest. Get set up with a feed reader - I use https://newsblur.com/ because it syncs across my computers and my phone, but there are prettier ones. There’s a wider variety of things to read and people to follow unless you were already into “weird facebook”. Finding sites to add can feel like a challenge at first if you usually only visit five sites. But instead of assuming that FB is going to control your feed, blog writers know that you control what you see and will surface other good authors for you to consider on a pretty regular basis. So really the hard part is inserting “feed reader” into your habit loop of Facebook - Instagram - Twitter - uh… dang, there used to be five whole websites in 2018?