Welcome to the Internet

When you ask someone where they're from, they'll usually tell you where they live. Sometimes, they'll tell you where they were born. For anybody born after 1980, they might tell you that they're from the Internet.

I was born in 1981, and I had my first AOL account when I was 13 years old. In addition to the hosted chat rooms on AOL, I had access to Usenet, and to IRC. It was a gateway to the entire world, but a gateway that disembodied anybody who passed through it. You could be anybody you wanted to be, including your authentic self, and you could become somebody new at the drop of a hat.

The Internet is still anonymous by default. Nobody forces you to use your government name, your actual face, the sound of your voice. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe that's a bad thing, that's really not what I'm thinking about right now. Instead, I'm thinking about what it means to exist as a citizen of the Internet, and how that impacts our connection to both other people and to ourselves.

Tech Independence

Derek Sivers is a writer and entrepreneur from Australia. In the nascent days of the modern Internet, he owned the company CDBaby. He's also written a guide on how to establish oneself on the Internet independent of anybody else, save for a few generic service providers to establish the building blocks of a domain name, data hosting, and an email server. This was a revelation to me, and I embraced it wholeheartedly. If you follow the instructions Sivers provides, you can have your own little corner of the Internet for a minimal fee (my domain name nbsab.in costs $15 per year, and I pay Vultr $6 every month for hosting, so less than $100/year overall). It's a great basic setup.

It's also completely isolated. This is great if you have a regular audience and a community who care about your website. It's less great if you're isolated and relatively anonymous. This is where social media networks show their value.

POSSE

POSSE stands for Publish Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere. Rather than relying on a service to provide you with a platform, you build your own platform and use that to push your content elsewhere. As Internet citizenship goes, it's home ownership instead of renting.

As it is with physical home ownership, there's a lot that goes into the setup and maintenance of your virtual home. You have to be comfortable with owning a domain name and learning how to maintain it. You have to decide how you're going to manage your content. It's social media without any of the layers of abstraction, and that's a dealbreaker for some folks.

So What?

There's no right way to do social media, so long as you aren't harming other people. Staying connected to other people is essential, especially as the outside world becomes more dangerous, and social media is the option with the lowest cost and the least amount of friction.

The variable is intention. You can choose to simply act without necessarily thinking. Or you can think deeply about what you're going to do before you do it (and, likely, not doing very much as a result). Me, I would rather do a few things very well than to do a lot without much thought in it. I also find that, by the end of a standard adult work day, my brain is too tired to think deeply for too long.